The Blue Nowhere

CHAPTER 00000001 / ONE

The battered white van had made her uneasy. Lara Gibson sat at the bar of Vesta's Grill on De Anza in Cupertino, California, gripping the cold stem of her martini glass and ignoring the two young chip-jocks standing nearby, casting flirtatious glances at her.

She looked outside again, into the overcast drizzle, and saw no sign of the windowless Econoline that, she believed, had followed her from her house, a few miles away, to the restaurant. Lara slid off the bar stool and walked to the window, glanced outside. The van wasn't in the restaurant's parking lot. Nor was it across the street in the Apple Computer lot or the one next to it, belonging to Sun Microsystems. Either of those lots would've been a logical place to park to keep an eye on her – if the driver had in fact been stalking her.

No, the van was just a coincidence, she decided – a coincidence aggravated by a splinter of paranoia.

She returned to the bar and glanced at the two young men who were alternately ignoring her and offering subtle smiles.

Like nearly all the young men here for happy hour they were in casual slacks and tie-less dress shirts and wore the ubiquitous insignia of Silicon Valley – corporate identification badges on thin canvas lanyards around their necks. These two sported the blue cards of Sun Microsystems. Other squadrons represented here were Compaq, Hewlett-Packard and Apple, not to mention a slew of new kids on the block, start-up Internet companies, which were held in some disdain by the venerable Valley regulars.

At thirty-two, Lara Gibson was probably five years older than her two admirers. And as a self-employed businesswoman who wasn't a geek – connected with a computer company – she was easily five times poorer. But that didn't matter to these two men, who were already captivated by her exotic, intense face surrounded by a tangle of raven hair, her ankle boots, a red-and-orange gypsy skirt and a black sleeveless top that showed off hard-earned biceps.

She figured that it would be two minutes before one of these boys approached her and she missed that estimate by only ten seconds.

The young man gave her a variation of a line she'd heard a dozen times before: Excuse me don't mean to interrupt but hey would you like me to break your boyfriend's leg for making a beautiful woman wait alone in a bar and by the way can I buy you a drink while you decide which kneecap?

Another woman might have gotten mad, another woman might have stammered and blushed and looked uneasy or might have flirted back and let him buy her an unwanted drink because she didn't have the wherewithal to handle the situation. But those would be women weaker than she. Lara Gibson was "the queen of urban protection," as the San Francisco Chronicle had once dubbed her. She fixed her eyes on the man's, gave a formal smile and said, "I don't care for any company right now."

Simple as that. End of conversation.

He blinked at her frankness, avoided her staunch eyes and returned to his friend.

Power… it was all about power.

She sipped her drink.

In fact, that damn white van had brought to mind all the rules she'd developed as someone who taught women to protect themselves in today's society. Several times on the way to the restaurant she'd glanced into her rearview mirror and noticed the van thirty or forty feet behind. It had been driven by some kid. He was white but his hair was knotted into messy brown dreadlocks. He wore combat fatigues and, despite the overcast and misty rain, sunglasses. This was, of course, Silicon Valley, home of slackers and hackers, and it wasn't unusual to stop in Starbucks for a venti skim latte and be waited on by a polite teenager with a dozen body piercings, a shaved head and an outfit like inner-city gangsta's. Still, the driver had seemed to stare at her with an eerie hostility.

Lara found herself absently fondling the can of pepper spray she kept in her purse.

Another glance out the window. No van. Only fancy cars bought with dotcom money.

A look around the room. Only harmless geeks.

Relax, she told herself and sipped her potent martini.

She glanced at the wall clock. Quarter after seven. Sandy was fifteen minutes late. Not like her. Lara pulled out her cell phone but the display read NO SERVICE.

She was about to find the pay phone when she glanced up and saw a young man enter the bar and wave at her. She knew him from somewhere but couldn't quite place him. His trim but long blond hair and the goatee had stuck in her mind. He wore white jeans and a rumpled blue work shirt. His concession to the fact he was part of corporate America was a tie; as befit a Silicon Valley businessman, though, the design wasn't stripes or Jerry Garcia flowers but a cartoon Tweety Bird.

"Hey, Lara." He walked up and shook her hand, leaned against the bar. "Remember me? I'm Will Randolph. Sandy 's cousin? Cheryl and I met you on Nantucket – at Fred and Mary's wedding."

Right, that's where she recognized him from. He and his pregnant wife sat at the same table with Lara and her boyfriend, Hank. "Sure. How you doing?"

"Good. Busy. But who isn't around here?"

His plastic neckwear read Xerox Corporation PARC. She was impressed. Even non-geeks knew about Xerox's legendary Palo Alto Research Center five or six miles north of here.

Will flagged down the bartender and ordered a light beer. "How's Hank?" he asked. " Sandy said he was trying to get a job at Wells Fargo."

"Oh, yeah, that came through. He's at orientation down in L.A. right now."

The beer came and Will sipped. "Congratulations."

A flash of white in the parking lot.

Lara looked toward it quickly, alarmed. But the vehicle turned out to be a white Ford Explorer with a young couple inside.

Her eyes focused past the Ford and scanned the street and the parking lots again, recalling that, on the way here, she'd glanced at the side of the van as it passed her when she'd turned into the restaurant's parking lot. There'd been a smear of something dark and reddish on the side; probably mud – but she'd thought it almost looked like blood.

"You okay?" Will asked.

"Sure. Sorry." She turned back to him, glad she had an ally. Another of her urban protection rules: Two people are always better than one. Lara now modified that by adding, Even if one of them is a skinny geek who can't be more than five feet, ten inches tall and is wearing a cartoon tie.

Will continued, " Sandy called me on my way home and asked if I'd stop by and give you a message. She tried to call you but couldn't get through on your cell. She's running late and asked if you could meet her at that place next to her office where you went last month, Ciro's? In Mountain View. She made a reservation at eight."

"You didn't have to come by. She could've called the bartender."

"She wanted me to give you the pictures I took at the wedding. You two can look at 'em tonight and tell me if you want any copies."

Will noticed a friend across the bar and waved – Silicon Valley may contain hundreds of square miles but it's really just a small town. He said to Lara, "Cheryl and I were going to bring the pictures this weekend – to Sandy 's place in Santa Barbara…"

"Yeah, we're going down on Friday."

Will paused and smiled as if he had a huge secret to share. He pulled his wallet out and flipped it open to a picture of himself, his wife and a very tiny, ruddy baby. "Last week," he said proudly. "Claire."

"Oh, adorable," Lara whispered.

"So we'll be staying pretty close to home for a while."

"How's Cheryl?"

"Fine. Baby's fine. There's nothing like it… But, I'll tell you, being a father totally changes your life."

"I'm sure it does."

Lara glanced at the clock again. Seven-thirty. It was a half-hour drive to Giro's this time of night. "I better get going."

Then, with a thud of alarm, she thought again about the van and the driver.

The dreadlocks.

The rusty smear on the battered door…

Will gestured for the check and paid.

"You don't have to do that," she said. "I'll get it."

He laughed. "You already did."

"What?"

"That mutual fund you told me about at the wedding. The one you'd just bought?"

Lara remembered shamelessly bragging about a biotech fund that had zoomed up 60 percent last year.

"I got home from Nantucket and bought a shitload of it… So… thanks." He tipped the beer toward her. Then he stood. "You all set?"

"You bet." Lara stared uneasily at the door as they walked toward it.

It was just paranoia, she told herself. She thought momentarily, as she did from time to time, that she should get a real job, like all of these people in the bar. She shouldn't dwell so much on the world of violence.

Sure, just paranoia…

But, if so, then why had the dreadlocked kid sped off so fast when she'd pulled into the parking lot here and glanced at him?

Will stepped outside and opened his umbrella. He held it up for both of them to use.

Lara recalled another rule of urban protection: Never feel too embarrassed or proud to ask for help.

And yet as Lara was about to ask Will Randolph to walk her to her car after they got the snapshots she had a thought:

If the kid in the van really was a threat, wasn't it selfish of her to ask him to endanger himself? Here he was, a husband and new father, with other people depending on him. It seemed unfair to -

"Something wrong?" Will asked.

"Not really."

"You sure?" he persisted.

"Well, I think somebody followed me here to the restaurant. Some kid."

Will looked around. "You see him?"

"Not now."

He asked, "You have that Web site, right? About how women can protect themselves."

"That's right."

"You think he knows about it? Maybe he's harassing you."

"Could be. You'd be surprised at the hate mail I get."

He reached for his cell phone. "You want to call the police?"

She debated.

Never feel too embarrassed or proud to ask for help.

"No, no. Just… would you mind, after we get the pictures, walking me to my car?"

Will smiled. "Of course not. I don't exactly know karate but I can yell for help with the best of them."

She laughed. "Thanks."

They walked along the sidewalk in front of the restaurant and she checked out the cars. As in every parking lot in Silicon Valley there were dozens of Saabs, BMWs and Lexuses. No vans, though. No kids. No bloody smears.

Will nodded toward where he'd parked, in the back lot. He said, "You see him?"

"No."

They walked past a stand of juniper and toward his car, a spotless silver Jaguar.

Jesus, did everybody in Silicon Valley have money except her?

He dug the keys out of his pocket. They walked to the trunk. "I only took two rolls at the wedding. But some of them are pretty good." He opened the trunk and paused and then looked around the parking lot. She did too. It was completely deserted. His was the only car there.

Will glanced at her. "You were probably wondering about the dreads."

"Dreads?"

"Yeah," he said. "The dreadlocks." His voice was flatter, distracted. He was still smiling but his face was different now. It seemed hungry.

"What do you mean?" she asked calmly but fear was detonating inside her. She noticed a chain was blocking the entrance to the back parking lot. And she knew he'd hooked it after he'd pulled in – to make sure nobody else could park there.

"It was a wig."

Oh, Jesus, my Lord, thought Lara Gibson, who hadn't prayed in twenty years.

He looked into her eyes, recording her fear. "I parked the Jag here a while ago then stole the van and followed you from home. With the combat jacket and wig on. You know, just so you'd get edgy and paranoid and want me to stay close… I know all your rules – that urban protection stuff. Never go into a deserted parking lot with a man. Married men with children are safer than single men. And my family portrait? In my wallet? I hacked it together from a picture in Parents magazine."

She whispered hopelessly, "You're not…?"

" Sandy 's cousin? Don't even know him. I picked Will Randolph because he's somebody you sort of know, who sort of looks like me. I mean, there's no way in the world I could've gotten you out here alone if you hadn't known me – or thought you did. Oh, you can take your hand out of your purse." He held up the canister of pepper spray. "I got it when we were walking outside."

"But…" Sobbing now, shoulders slumped in hopelessness. "Who are you? You don't even know me…"

"Not true, Lara," he whispered, studying her anguish the way an imperious chess master examines his defeated opponent's face. "I know everything about you. Everything in the world."

CHAPTER 00000010 / TWO

Slowly, slowly… Don't damage them, don't break them.

One by one the tiny screws eased from the black plastic housing of the small radio and fell into the young man's long, exceedingly muscular fingers. Once, he nearly stripped the minuscule threads of one screw and had to stop, sit back in his chair and gaze out his small window at the overcast sky blanketing Santa Clara County until he'd relaxed. The time was eight A.M. and he'd been at this arduous task for over two hours.

Finally all twelve screws securing the radio housing were removed and placed on the sticky side of a yellow Post-it. Wyatt Gillette removed the chassis of the Samsung and studied it.

His curiosity, as always, plunged forward like a racehorse. He wondered why the designers had allowed this amount of space between the boards, why the tuner used string of this particular gauge, what the proportion of metals in the solder was.

Maybe this was the optimal design, but maybe not.

Maybe the engineers had been lazy or distracted.

Was there a better way to build the radio?

He continued dismantling it, unscrewing the circuit boards themselves.

Slowly, slowly…

At twenty-nine Wyatt Gillette had the hollow face of a man who was six feet, one inch tall and weighed 154 pounds, a man about whom people were always thinking, Somebody should fatten him up. His hair was dark, nearly black, and hadn't been recently trimmed or washed. On his right arm was a clumsy tattoo of a seagull flying over a palm tree. Faded blue jeans and a gray work shirt hung loosely on him.

He shivered in the chill spring air. A tremor made his fingers jerk and he stripped the slot in the head of one tiny screw. He sighed in frustration. As talented mechanically as Gillette was, without the proper equipment you can only do so much and he was now using a screwdriver he'd made from a paper clip. He had no tools other than it and his fingernails. Even a razor blade would have been more efficient but that was something not to be found here, in Gillette's temporary home, the medium-security Federal Men's Correctional Facility in San Jose, California.

Slowly, slowly…

Once the circuit board was dismantled he located the holy grail he'd been after – a small gray transistor – and he bent its tiny wires until they fatigued. He then mounted the transistor to the small circuit board he'd been working on for months, carefully twining together the wire leads.

Just as he finished, a door slammed nearby and footsteps sounded in the corridor. Gillette looked up, alarmed.

Someone was coming to his cell. Oh, Christ, no, he thought.

The footsteps were about twenty feet away. He slipped the circuit board he'd been working on into a copy of Wired magazine and shoved the components back into the housing of the radio. He set it against the wall.

He lay back on the cot and began flipping through another magazine, 2600, the hacking journal, praying to the general-purpose god that even atheist prisoners start bargaining with soon after they land in jail: Please let them not roust me. And if they do, please let them not find the circuit board.

The guard looked through the peephole and said, "Position, Gillette."

The inmate stood and stepped to the back of the room, hands on his head.

The guard entered the small, dim cell. But this wasn't, as it turned out, a roust. The man didn't even look around the cell; he silently shackled Gillette's hands in front of him and led him out the door.

At the intersection of hallways where the administrative seclusion wing ran into the general population wing the guard turned and led his prisoner down a corridor that wasn't familiar to Gillette. The sounds of music and shouts from the exercise yard faded and in a few minutes he was directed into a small room furnished with a table and two benches, both bolted to the floor. There were rings on the table for an inmate's shackles though the guard didn't hook Gillette's to them.

"Sit down."

Gillette did.

The guard left and the door slammed, leaving Gillette alone with his curiosity and itchy desire to get back to his circuit board. He sat shivering in the windowless room, which seemed to be less a place in the Real World than a scene from a computer game, one set in medieval times. This cell, he decided, was the chamber where the bodies of heretics broken on the rack were left to await the high executioner's axe.

Thomas Frederick Anderson was a man of many names.

Tom or Tommy in his grade school days.

A dozen handles like Stealth and CryptO when he'd been a high school student in Menlo Park, California, running bulletin boards and hacking on Trash-80s and Commodores and Apples.

He'd been T.F. when he'd worked for the security departments of AT &T and Sprint and Cellular One, tracking down hackers and phone phreaks and call jackers (the initials, colleagues decided, stood for "Tenacious Fucker," in light of his 97 percent success record in helping the cops catch the perps).

As a young police detective in San Jose he'd had another series of names – he'd been known as Courtney 334 or Lonelygirl or BrittanyT in online chat rooms, where in the personas of fourteen-year-old girls he'd written awkward messages to pedophiles, who would e-mail seductive propositions to these fictional dream girls and then drive to suburban shopping malls for romantic liaisons, only to find that their dates were in fact a half-dozen cops armed with a warrant and guns.

Nowadays he was usually called either Dr. Anderson -when introduced at computer conferences – or just plain Andy. In official records, though, he was Lieutenant Thomas F. Anderson, chief of the California State Police Computer Crimes Unit.

The lanky man, forty-five years old, with thinning curly brown hair, now walked down a chill, damp corridor beside the pudgy warden of the San Jose Correctional Facility -San Ho, as it was called by perps and cops alike. A solidly built Latino guard accompanied them.

They continued down the hallway until they came to a door. The warden nodded. The guard opened it and Anderson stepped inside, eyeing the prisoner.

Wyatt Gillette was very pale – he had a "hacker tan," as the pallor was ironically called – and quite thin. His hair was filthy, as were his fingernails. Gillette apparently hadn't showered or shaved in days.

The cop noticed an odd look in Gillette's dark brown eyes; he was blinking in recognition. He asked, "You're… are you Andy Anderson?"

"That's Detective Anderson," the warden corrected, his voice a whip crack.

"You run the state's computer crimes division," Gillette said.

"You know me?"

"I heard you lecture at Comsec a couple of years ago."

The Comsec conference on computer and network security was limited to documented security professionals and law enforcers; it was closed to outsiders. Anderson knew it was a national pastime for young hackers to try to crack into the registration computer and issue themselves admission badges. Only two or three had ever been able to do so in the history of the conference.

"How'd you get in?"

Gillette shrugged. "I found a badge somebody dropped."

Anderson nodded skeptically. "What'd you think of my lecture?"

"I agree with you: silicon chips'll be outmoded faster than most people think. Computers'll be running on molecular electronics. And that means users'll have to start looking at a whole new way to protect themselves against hackers."

"Nobody else felt that way at the conference."

"They heckled you," Gillette recalled.

"But you didn't?"

"No. I took notes."

The warden leaned against the wall while the cop sat down across from Gillette and said, "You've got one year left on a three-year sentence under the federal Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. You cracked Western Software's machines and stole the source codes for most of their programs, right?"

Gillette nodded.

The source code is the brains and heart of software, fiercely guarded by its owner. Stealing it lets the thief easily strip out identification and security codes then repackage the software and sell it under his own name. Western Software's source codes for the company's games, business applications and utilities were its main assets. If an unscrupulous hacker had stolen the codes he might have put the billion-dollar company out of business.

Gillette pointed out: "I didn't do anything with the codes. I erased them after I downloaded them."

"Then why'd you crack their systems?"

The hacker shrugged. "I saw the head of the company on CNN or something. He said nobody could get into their network. Their security systems were foolproof. I wanted to see if that was true."

"Were they?"

"As a matter of fact, yeah, they were foolproof. The problem is that you don't have to protect yourself against fools. You have to protect yourself against people like me."

"Well, once you'd broken in why didn't you tell the company about the security flaws? Do a white hat?"

White hats were hackers who cracked into computer systems and then pointed out the security flaws to their victims. Sometimes for the glory of it, sometimes for money.

Sometimes even because they thought it was the right thing to do.

Gillette shrugged. "It's their problem. That guy said that it couldn't be done. I just wanted to see if I could."

"Why?"

Another shrug. "Curious."

"Why'd the feds come down on you so hard?" Anderson asked. If a hacker doesn't disrupt business or try to sell what he steals the FBI rarely even investigates, let alone refers a case to the U.S. attorney.

It was the warden who answered. "The reason is the DoD."

"Department of Defense?" Anderson asked, glancing at a gaudy tattoo on Gillette's arm. Was that an airplane? No, it was a bird of some kind.

"It's bogus," Gillette muttered. "Complete bullshit."

The cop looked at the warden, who explained, "The Pentagon thinks he wrote some program or something that cracked the DoD's latest encryption software."

"Their Standard 12?" Anderson gave a laugh. "You'd need a dozen supercomputers running full time for six months to crack a single e-mail."

Standard 12 had recently replaced DES – the Defense Encryption Standard – as the state-of-the-art encryption software for the government. It was used to encrypt secret data and messages. The encryption program was so important to national security that it was considered a munition under the export laws and couldn't be transferred overseas without military approval.

Anderson continued, "But even if he did crack something encoded with Standard 12, so what? Everybody tries to crack encryptions."

There was nothing illegal about this as long as the encrypted document wasn't classified or stolen. In fact, many software manufacturers dare people to try to break documents encrypted with their programs and offer prizes to anybody who can do so.

"No," Gillette explained. "The DoD's saying that I cracked into their computer, found out something about how Standard 12 works and then wrote some script that decrypts the document. It can do it in seconds."

"Impossible," Anderson said, laughing. "Can't be done."

Gillette said, "That's what I told them. They didn't believe me."

Yet as Anderson studied the man's quick eyes, hollow beneath dark brows, hands fidgeting impatiently in front of him, he wondered if maybe the hacker actually had written a magic program like this. Anderson himself couldn't have done it; he didn't know anybody who could. But after all, the cop was here now, hat in hand, because Gillette was a wizard, the term used by hackers to describe those among them who've reached the highest levels of skill in the Machine World.

There was a knock on the door and the guard let two men inside. The first one, fortyish, had a lean face, dark blond hair swept back and frozen in place with hairspray. Honest-to-God sideburns too. He wore a cheap gray suit. His overwashed white shirt was far too big for him and was halfway untucked. He glanced at Gillette without a splinter of interest. "Sir," he said to the warden in a flat voice. "I'm Detective Frank Bishop, state police, Homicide." He nodded an anemic greeting to Anderson and fell silent.

The second man, a little younger, much heavier, shook the warden's hand then Anderson 's. "Detective Bob Shelton." His face was pockmarked from childhood acne.

Anderson didn't know anything about Shelton but he'd talked to Bishop and had mixed feelings concerning his involvement in the case Anderson was here about. Bishop was supposedly a wizard in his own right though his expertise lay in tracking down killers and rapists in hard-scrabble neighborhoods like the Oakland waterfront, Haight-Ashbury and the infamous San Francisco Tenderloin. Computer Crimes wasn't authorized – or equipped – to run a homicide like this one without somebody from the Violent Crimes detail but, after several brief phone discussions with Bishop, Anderson was not impressed. The homicide cop seemed humorless and distracted and, more troubling, knew zero about computers.

Anderson had also heard that Bishop himself didn't even want to be working with Computer Crimes. He'd been lobbying for the MARINKILL case – so named by the FBI for the site of the crime: Several days ago three bank robbers had murdered two bystanders and a cop at a Bank of America branch in Sausalito in Marin County and had been seen headed east, which meant they might very well turn south toward Bishop's present turf, the San Jose area.

Now, in fact, the first thing Bishop did was to check the screen of his cell phone, presumably to see if he had a page or message about a reassignment.

Anderson said to the detectives, "You gentlemen want to sit down?" Nodding at the benches around the metal table.

Bishop shook his head and remained standing. He tucked his shirt in then crossed his arms. Shelton sat down next to Gillette. Then the bulky cop looked distastefully at the prisoner and got up, sat on the other side of the table. To Gillette he muttered, "You might want to wash up sometime."

The convict retorted, "You might want to ask the warden why I only get one shower a week."

"Because, Wyatt," the warden said patiently, "you broke the prison rules. That's why you're in administrative seclusion."

Anderson didn't have the patience or time for squabbles. He said to Gillette, "We've got a problem and we're hoping you'll help us with it." He glanced at Bishop and asked, "You want to brief him?"

According to state police protocol, Frank Bishop was technically in charge of the case. But the detective shook his head. "No, sir, you can go ahead."

"Last night a woman was abducted from a restaurant in Cupertino. She was murdered and her body found in Portola Valley. She'd been stabbed to death. She wasn't sexually molested and there's no apparent motive.

"Now, the victim, Lara Gibson, ran this Web site about how women can protect themselves and gave lectures on the subject around the country. She'd been in the press a lot and was on Larry King. Well, what happens is, she's in a bar and this guy comes in who seems to know her. He gives his name as Will Randolph, the bartender said. That's the name of the cousin of the woman the victim was going to meet for dinner last night. Randolph wasn't involved -he's been in New York for a week – but we found a digital picture of him on the victim's computer and they look alike, the suspect and Randolph. We think that's why the perp picked him to impersonate.

"So, he knows all this information about her. Friends, where she's traveled, what she does, what stocks she owns, who her boyfriend is. It even looked like he waved to somebody in the bar but Homicide canvassed most of the patrons who were there last night and didn't find anybody who knew him. So we think he was faking – you know, to put her at ease, making it look like he was a regular."

"He social engineered her," Gillette offered.

"How's that?" Shelton asked.

Anderson knew the term but he deferred to Gillette, who said, "It means conning somebody, pretending you're somebody you're not. Hackers do it to get access to databases and phone lines and passcodes. The more facts about somebody you can feed back to them, the more they believe you and the more they'll do what you want them to."

"Now, the girlfriend Lara was supposed to meet – Sandra Hardwick – said she got a call from somebody claiming to be Lara's boyfriend canceling the dinner plans. She tried to call Lara but her phone was out."

Gillette nodded. "He crashed her mobile phone." Then he frowned. "No, probably the whole cell."

Anderson nodded. "Mobile America reported an outage in cell 850 for exactly forty-five minutes. Somebody loaded code that shut the switch down then turned it back on."

Gillette's eyes narrowed. The detective could see he was growing interested.

"So," the hacker mused, "he turned himself into somebody she'd trust and then he killed her. And he did it with information he got from her computer."

"Exactly."

"Did she have an online service?"

"Horizon On-Line."

Gillette laughed. "Jesus, you know how secure that is? He hacked into one of their routers and read her e-mails." Then he shook his head, studied Anderson 's face. "But that's kindergarten stuff. Anybody could do that. There's more, isn't there?"

"Right," Anderson continued. "We talked to her boyfriend and went through her computer. Half the information the bartender heard the killer tell her wasn't in her e-mails. It was in the machine itself."

"Maybe he went Dumpster diving and got the information that way."

Anderson explained to Bishop and Shelton, "He means going digging through trash bins to get information that'll help you hack – discarded company manuals, printouts, bills, receipts, things like that." But he said to Gillette, "I doubt it – everything he knew was stored on her machine."

"What about hard access?" Gillette asked. Hard access is when a hacker breaks into somebody's house or office and goes through the victim's machine itself. Soft access is breaking into somebody's computer online from a remote location.

But Anderson responded, "It had to be soft access. I talked to the friend Lara was supposed to meet, Sandra. She said the only time they talked about getting together that night was in an instant message that afternoon and Lara was home all day. The killer had to be in a different location."

"This's interesting," Gillette whispered.

"I thought so too," Anderson said. "The bottom line is that we think there's some kind of new virus the killer used to get inside her machine. The thing is, Computer Crimes can't find it. We're hoping you'd take a look."

Gillette nodded, squinting as he looked up at the grimy ceiling. Anderson noticed the young man's fingers were moving in tiny, rapid taps. At first the cop thought Gillette had palsy or some nervous twitch. But then he realized what the hacker was doing. He was unconsciously typing on an invisible keyboard – a nervous habit, it seemed.

The hacker lowered his eyes to Anderson. "What'd you use to examine her drive?"

"Norton Commander, Vi-Scan 5.0, the FBI's forensic detection package, Restores and the DoD's Partition and File Allocation Analyzer 6.2. We even tried Surface-Scour."

Gillette gave a confused laugh. "All that and you didn't find anything?"

"Nope."

"How'm I going to find something you couldn't?"

"I've looked at some of the software you've written -there're only three or four people in the world who could write script like that. You've gotta have code that's better than ours – or could hack some together."

Gillette asked Anderson, "So what's in it for me?"

"What?" Bob Shelton asked, wrinkling up his pocked face and staring at the hacker.

"If I help you what do I get?"

"You little prick," Shelton snapped. "A girl got murdered. Don't you give a shit?"

"I'm sorry about her," Gillette shot back. "But the deal is if I help you I want something in return."

Anderson asked, "Such as?"

"I want a machine."

"No computers," the warden snapped. "No way." To Anderson he said, "That's why he's in seclusion. We caught him at the computer in the library – on the Internet. The judge issued an order as part of his sentence that he can't go online."

"I won't go online," Gillette said. "I'll stay on E wing, where I am now. I won't have access to a phone line."

The warden scoffed. "You'd rather stay in administrative seclusion-"

"Solitary confinement," Gillette corrected.

"-just to have a computer?"

"Yes."

Anderson asked, "If he was to stay in seclusion, so there was no chance of going online, would that be okay?"

"I guess," the warden said uncertainly.

The cop then said to Gillette, "It's a deal. We'll get you a laptop."

"You're going to bargain with him?" Shelton asked Anderson in disbelief. He glanced at Bishop for support but the lean cop brushed at his anachronistic sideburns and studied his cell phone again, waiting for his reprieve.

Anderson didn't respond to Shelton. He added to Gillette, "But you get your machine only after you analyze the Gibson woman's computer and give us a complete report."

"Absolutely," the prisoner said, eyes glowing with excitement.

"Her machine's an IBM clone, off the shelf. We'll get it over here in the next hour. We've got all her disks and software and-"

"No, no, no," Gillette said firmly. "I can't do it here."

"Why?"

"I'll need access to a mainframe – maybe a supercomputer. I'll need tech manuals, software."

Anderson looked at Bishop, who didn't seem to be listening to any of this.

"No fucking way," said Shelton, the more talkative of the homicide partners, even if he had a distinctly limited vocabulary.

Anderson was debating with himself when the warden asked, "Can I see you gentlemen up the hall for a minute?"

CHAPTER 00000011 / THREE

It had been a fun hack.

But not as challenging as he would've liked.

Phate – his screen name, spelled in the best hacker tradition with a phand not an f- now drove to his house in Los Altos, in the heart of Silicon Valley.

He'd been busy this morning: He'd abandoned the blood-smeared white van that he'd used to light the fires of paranoia within Lara Gibson yesterday. And he'd ditched the disguises – the dreadlock wig, combat jacket and sunglasses of the stalker and the squeaky-clean chip-jockey costume of Will Randolph, Sandy Hardwick's accommodating cousin.

He was now someone entirely different. Not his real name or identity, of course – Jon Patrick Holloway, who'd been born twenty-seven years ago in Upper Saddle River, New Jersey. No, he was at the moment one of six or seven fictional characters he'd created recently. They were like a group of friends to him and came complete with driver's licenses, employee ID cards, social security cards and all the telltale documentation that is so indispensable nowadays. He'd even endowed his cast with different accents and mannerisms, which he practiced religiously.

Who do you want to be?

Phate's answer to this question was: pretty much anybody in the world.

Reflecting now on the Lara Gibson hack, he decided it'd been just a bit too easy to get close to someone who prided herself on being the queen of urban protection.

And so it was time to notch the game up a bit.

Phate's Jaguar moved slowly through morning rush-hour traffic along Interstate 280, the Junipero Serra Highway. To the west mountains rose into the specters of fog slipping overhead toward San Francisco Bay. In recent years droughts had plagued the Valley but much of this spring – like today, for instance – had been rainy and the flora was a rich green. Phate, however, paid the expansive scenery no mind. He was listening to a play on his CD player – Death of a Salesman. It was one of his favorites. Occasionally his mouth would move to the words (he knew all the parts).

Ten minutes later, at 8:45, he was pulling up into the garage of his large, detached house in the Stonecrest development off El Monte Road in Los Altos.

He parked in the garage, closed the door. He noticed a drop of Lara Gibson's blood in the shape of a sloppy comma on the otherwise immaculate floor. Careless to miss it earlier, he chided himself. He cleaned the stain then went inside, closed and locked the door.

The house was new, only about six months old, and smelled of carpet glue and sweet paint.

If neighbors were to come a-calling to welcome him to the neighborhood and stand in the front hallway, glancing into the living room, they'd see evidence of an upper-middle-class family living the comfortable life that chip money has provided for so many people here in the Valley.

Hey, nice to meet you… Yeah, that's right – just moved in last month… I'm with a dot-com start-up over in Palo Alto. They brought me and half the furniture out from Austin early, before Kathy and the kids – they'll be moving here in June after school's over… That's them. Took that one on vacation in Florida in January. Troy and Brittany. He's seven. She's going to be five next month.

On the mantel and on the expensive end tables and coffee tables were dozens of pictures of Phate and a blond woman, posing at the beach, horseback riding, hugging each other atop a mountain at a ski resort, dancing at their wedding. Other pictures showed the couple with their two children. Vacations, soccer practice, Christmas, Easter.

You know, I'd ask you over for dinner or something but this new company's got me working like crazy… Probably better to wait till after the family gets here anyway, you know. Kathy's really the social director… And a lot better cook than me. Okay, you take care now.

And the neighbors would pass him the welcoming wine or cookies or begonias and return home, never guessing that, in the best spirit of creative social engineering, the entire scene had been as fake as a movie set.

Like the pictures he'd shown Lara Gibson these snapshots had been created on his computer: his face had replaced a male model's, Kathy's was a generic female face, morphed from a model in Self. The kids had come from a Vogue Bambini. The house itself was a facade too; the living room and hall were the only fully furnished rooms – and that had been done exclusively to fool people who came to the door. In the bedroom was a cot and lamp. In the dining room – Phate's office – were a table, lamp, two laptop computers and an office chair. In the basement… well, the basement contained a few other things – but they definitely weren't for public view.

If need be, and he knew it was a possibility, he could walk out the door immediately and leave everything behind. All his important possessions – his serious hardware, the computer antiquities he collected, his ID card machine, the supercomputer parts he bought and sold to make his living – were in a warehouse miles away. And there was nothing here that would lead police to that location.

He now walked into the dining room and sat down at the table. He turned on a laptop.

The screen came to life, a C: prompt flashed on the screen and, with the appearance of that blinking symbol, Phate rose from the dead.

Who do you want to be?

Well, at the moment, he was no longer Jon Patrick Holloway or Will Randolph or Warren Gregg or James L. Seymour or any of the other characters he'd created. He was now Phate. No longer the blond, five-foot-ten character of slight build, floating aimlessly among three-dimensional houses and office buildings and stores and airplanes and concrete ribbons of highway and brown lawns chain-link fences semiconductor plants strip malls pets people people people people as numerous as flies…

Thiswas his reality, the world inside his monitor.

He keyed some commands and with an excited churning in his groin he heard the rising and falling whistle of his modem's sensual electronic handshake (most real hackers would never use dog-slow modems and telephone lines like this, rather than a direct connection, to get online. But Phate had to compromise; speed was far less important than being able to stay mobile and hide his tracks through millions of miles of telephone lines around the world).

After he was connected to the Net he checked his e-mail. He would have opened any letters from Shawn right away but there were none; the others he'd read later. He exited the mail reader and then keyed in another command. A menu popped up on his screen.

When he and Shawn had written the software for Trapdoor last year he'd decided that, even though no one else would be using it, he'd make the menu user-friendly – simply because this is what you did when you were a brilliant codeslinger.

Trapdoor

Main Menu

1. Do you want to continue a prior session?

2. Do you want to create/open/edit a background file?

3. Do you want to find a new target?

4. Do you want to decode/decrypt a password or text?

5. Do you want to exit to the system?

He scrolled down to 3 and hit the ENTER key.

A moment later the Trapdoor program politely asked:

Please enter the e-mail address of the target.

From memory he typed a screen name and hit ENTER. Within ten seconds he was connected to someone else's machine – in effect, looking over the unsuspecting user's shoulder. He read for a few moments then started jotting notes.

Lara Gibson had been a fun hack, but this one would be better.

"He made this," the warden told them.

The cops stood in a storage room in San Ho. Lining the shelves were drug paraphernalia, Nazi decorations and Nation of Islam banners, handmade weapons – clubs and knives and knuckle-dusters, even a few guns. This was the confiscation room and these grim items had been taken away from the prison's difficult residents over the past several years.

What the warden was now pointing out, though, was nothing so clearly inflammatory or deadly. It was a wooden box about two by three feet, filled with a hundred strips of bell wire, which connected dozens of electronic components.

"What is it?" Bob Shelton asked in his gravelly voice.

Andy Anderson laughed and whispered, "Jesus, it's a computer. It's a homemade computer." He leaned forward, studying the simplicity of the wiring, the perfect twisting of the solderless connections, the efficient use of space. It was rudimentary and yet it was astonishingly elegant.

"I didn't know you could make a computer," Shelton offered. Thin Frank Bishop said nothing.

The warden said, "Gillette's the worst addict I've ever seen – and we get guys in here've been on smack for years. Only what he's addicted to are these – computers. I guarantee you he'll do anything he can to get online. And he's capable of hurting people to do it. I mean, hurting them bad. He built this just to get on the Internet."

"It's got a modem built in?" Anderson asked, still awed by the device. "Wait, there it is, yeah."

"So I'd think twice about getting him out."

"We can control him," Anderson said, reluctantly looking away from Gillette's creation.

"You think you can," the warden said, shrugging. "People like him'll say whatever they have to so they can get online. Just like alcoholics. You know about his wife?"

"He's married?" Anderson asked.

"Was. He tried to stop hacking after he got married but couldn't. Then he got arrested and they lost everything paying the lawyer and court fine. She divorced him a couple years ago. I was here when he got the papers. He didn't even care."

The door opened and a guard entered with a battered recycled manila folder. He handed it to the warden, who in turned passed it to Anderson. "Here's the file we've got on him. Might help you decide whether you really want him or not."

Anderson flipped through the file. The prisoner had a record going back years. The juvenile detention time, though, wasn't for anything serious: Gillette had called Pacific Bell's main office from a pay phone – what hackers call fortress phones – and programmed it to let him make free long-distance calls. Fortress phones are considered elementary schools for young hackers, who use them to break into phone company switches, which are nothing more than huge computer systems. The art of cracking into the phone company to make free calls or just for the challenge of it is known as phreaking. The notes in the file indicated that Gillette had placed stolen calls to the time and temperature numbers in Paris, Athens, Frankfurt, Tokyo and Ankara. Which suggested that he'd broken into the system just because he was curious to see if he could do it. He wasn't after money.

Anderson kept flipping through the young man's file. There was clearly something to what the warden had said; Gillette's behavior was addictive. He'd been questioned in connection with twelve major hacking incidents over the past eight years. In his sentencing for the Western Software hack the prosecutor had borrowed a phrase from the judge who'd sentenced the famous hacker Kevin Mitnick, saying that Gillette was "dangerous when armed with a keyboard."

The hacker's behavior regarding computers wasn't, however, exclusively felonious, Anderson also learned. He'd worked for a number of Silicon Valley companies and invariably had gotten glowing reports on his programming skills – at least until he was fired for missing work or falling asleep on the job because he'd been up all night hacking. He'd also written a lot of brilliant freeware and shareware- software programs given away to anyone who wants them- and had lectured at conferences about new developments in computer programming languages and security.

Then Anderson did a double take and gave a surprised laugh. He was looking at a reprint of an article that Wyatt Gillette had written for On-Line magazine several years ago. The article was well known and Anderson recalled reading it when it first came out but had paid no attention to who the author was. The title was "Life in the Blue Nowhere." Its theme was that computers are the first technological invention in history that affect every aspect of human life, from psychology to entertainment to intelligence to material comfort to evil, and that, because of this, humans and machines will continue to grow closer together. There are many benefits to this but also many dangers. The phrase "Blue Nowhere," which was replacing the term "cyberspace," meant the world of computers, or, as it was also called, the Machine World. In Gillette's coined phrase, "Blue" referred to the electricity that made computers work. "Nowhere" meant that it was an intangible place.

Andy Anderson also found some photocopies of documents from Gillette's most recent trial. He saw dozens of letters that had been sent to the judge, requesting leniency in sentencing. The hacker's mother had passed away – an unexpected heart attack when the woman was in her fifties – but it sounded like the young man and his father had an enviable relationship. Gillette's father, an American engineer working in Saudi Arabia, had e-mailed several heartfelt pleas to the judge for a reduced sentence. The hacker's brother, Rick, a government employee in Montana had come to his sibling's aid with several faxed letters to the court, also urging leniency. Rick Gillette even touchingly suggested that his brother could come live with him and his wife "in a rugged and pristine mountain setting," as if clean air and physical labor could cure the hacker of his criminal ways.

Anderson was touched by this but surprised as well; most of the hackers that Anderson had arrested came from dysfunctional families.

He closed the file and handed it to Bishop, who read through it absently, seemingly bewildered by the technical references to machines. The detective muttered, "The Blue Nowhere?" A moment later he gave up and passed the folder to his partner.

"What's the timetable for release?" Shelton asked, flipping through the file.

Anderson replied, "We've got the paperwork waiting at the courthouse now. As soon as we can get a federal magistrate to sign it Gillette's ours."

"I'm just giving you fair warning," the warden said ominously. He nodded at the homemade computer. "If you want to go ahead with a release, be my guest. Only you gotta pretend he's a junkie who's been off the needle for two weeks."

Shelton said, "I think we ought to call the FBI. We could use some feds anyway on this one. And there'd be more bodies to keep an eye on him."

But Anderson shook his head. "If we tell them then the DoD'll hear about it and have a stroke about us releasing the man who cracked their Standard 12. Gillette'll be back inside in a half hour. No, we've got to keep it quiet. The release order'll be under a John Doe."

Anderson looked toward Bishop, caught in the act of checking out his silent cell phone once again. "What do you think, Frank?"

The lean detective tucked in his shirt again and finally put together several complete sentences. "Well, sir, I think we should get him out and the sooner the better. That killer probably isn't sitting around talking. Like us."

CHAPTER 00000100 / FOUR

For a terrible half hour Wyatt Gillette had sat in the cold, medieval dungeon, refusing to speculate if it would really happen – if he'd be released. He wouldn't allow himself even a wisp of hope; in prison, expectations are the first to die.

Then, with a nearly silent click, the door opened and the cops returned.

Gillette looked up and happened to notice in Anderson 's left lobe a tiny brown dot of an earring hole that had closed up long ago. "A magistrate's signed a temporary release order," the cop said.

Gillette realized that he'd been sitting with his teeth clenched and shoulders drawn into a fierce knot. With this news he exhaled in relief. Thank you, thank you…

"Now, you have a choice. Either you'll be shackled the whole time you're out or you wear an electronic tracking anklet."

The hacker considered this. "Anklet."

"It's a new variety," Anderson said. "Titanium. You can only get it on and off with a special key. Nobody's ever slipped out of one."

"Well, one guy did," Bob Shelton said cheerfully. "But he had to cut his foot off to do it. He only got a mile before he bled to death."

Gillette by now disliked the burly cop as much as Shelton, for some reason, seemed to hate him.

"It tracks you for sixty miles and broadcasts through metal," Anderson continued.

"You made your point," Gillette said. To the warden he said, "I need some things from my cell."

"What things?" the man grumbled. "You aren't gonna be away that long, Gillette. You don't need to pack."

Gillette said to Anderson, "I need some of my books and notebooks. And I've got a lot of printouts that'll be helpful – from things like Wired and 2600."

The CCU cop said to the warden, "It's okay."

A loud electronic braying came from nearby. Gillette jumped at the noise. It took a minute to recognize the sound, one that he'd never heard in San Ho. Frank Bishop answered his cell phone. The gaunt cop took the call, listened for a moment, flicking at a sideburn, then answered, "Yessir, Captain… And?" There was a long pause, during which the corner of his mouth tightened very slightly. "You can't do anything?… Okay, sir."

He hung up.

Anderson cocked an eyebrow at him. The homicide detective said evenly, "That was Captain Bernstein. There was another report on the wire about the MARINKILL case. The perps were spotted near Walnut Creek. Probably headed in this direction." He glanced quickly at Gillette as if he were a stain on the bench and then said to Anderson, "I should tell you – I requested to be removed from this case and put on that one. They said no. Captain Bernstein thought I'd be more helpful here."

"Thanks for telling me," Anderson said. To Gillette, though, the CCU cop didn't seem particularly grateful for the confirmation that the detective was only halfheartedly involved in the case. Anderson asked Shelton, "Did you want MARINKILL too?"

"No. I wanted this one. The girl was killed pretty much in my backyard. I want to make sure it doesn't happen again."

Anderson glanced at his watch. It was 9:15. "We should get back to CCU."

The warden summoned the huge guard and instructions were given. The man led Gillette back down the corridor to his cell. Five minutes later he'd collected what he needed, used the toilet and pulled on his jacket. He preceded the guard into the central part of San Ho.

Out one door, out another, past the visitors' area, where he'd see a friend once a month or so, and the lawyer-client rooms, where he'd spent so many hours working on the futile appeal with the man who'd taken every penny that he and Ellie had.

Finally, breathing fast now as the excitement flooded into him, Gillette stepped through the second-to-the-last doorway – into the area of offices and the guards' locker rooms. The cops were waiting for him there.

Anderson nodded to the guard, who undid the wrist shackles. For the first time in two years Gillette was no longer under the physical domination of the prison system. He'd attained a freedom of sorts.

He rubbed the skin on his wrists as they walked toward the exit – two wooden doors with latticed fireglass in them, through which Gillette could see the gray sky. "We'll put the anklet on outside," Anderson said.

Shelton stepped brusquely up to the hacker and whispered, "I want to say one thing, Gillette. Maybe you're thinking you'll be in striking distance of some weapon or another, what with your hands free. Well, if you even get an itchy look that I don't like you're going to get hurt bad. Follow me? I won't hesitate to take you out."

"I broke into a computer," the hacker said, exasperated. "That's all I did. I've never hurt anyone."

"Just remember what I said."

Gillette sped up slightly so that he was walking next to Anderson. "Where're we going?"

"The state police Computer Crimes Unit office is in San Jose. It's a separate facility. We--"

An alarm went off and a red light blinked on the metal detector they were walking through. Since they were leaving, not entering, the prison, the guard manning the security station shut the buzzer off and nodded at them to continue.

But just as Anderson put his hand on the front door to push it open a voice called, "Excuse me." It was Frank Bishop and he was pointing at Gillette. "Scan him."

Gillette laughed. "That's crazy. I'm going out, not coming in. Who's going to smuggle something out of prison?"

Anderson said nothing but Bishop gestured the guard forward. He ran a metal-detecting wand over Gillette's body. The wand got to his right slacks pocket and emitted a piercing squeal.

The guard reached into the pocket and pulled out a circuit board, sprouting wires.

"What the fuck's that?" Shelton snapped.

Anderson examined it closely. "A red box?" he asked Gillette, who glanced at the ceiling in frustration. "Yeah."

The detective said to Bishop and Shelton, "There're dozens of circuit boxes that phone phreaks used to cheat the phone company – to get free service, tap somebody's line, cut out wiretaps… They're known by colors. You don't see many of them anymore except this one – a red box. It mimics the sound of coins in a pay phone. You can call anywhere in the world and just keep punching the coin-drop-tone button enough times to pay for the call." He looked at Gillette. "What were you going to do with this?"

"Figured I might get lost and need to phone somebody."

"You could also sell a red box on the street for, I don't know, a couple of hundred bucks, to a phone phreak. If, say, you were to escape and needed some money."

"I guess somebody could. But I'm not going to do that."

Anderson looked the board over. "Nice wiring."

"Thanks."

"You missed having a soldering iron, right?"

Gillette nodded. "I sure did."

"You pull something like that again and you'll be back inside as soon as I can get a patrol car to bring you in. Got it?"

"Got it."

"Nice try," Bob Shelton whispered. "But, fuck, life's just one big disappointment, don't you think?"

No, Wyatt Gillette thought. Life's just one big hack.

On the eastern edge of Silicon Valley a pudgy fifteen-year-old student pounded furiously on a keyboard as he peered through thick glasses at a monitor in the computer room at St. Francis Academy, an old, private boy's school in San Jose.

The name of this area wasn't quite right, though. Yeah, it had computers in it. But the "room" part was a little dicey, the students thought. Stuck away down in the basement, bars on the windows, it looked like a cell. It may actually have been one once; this part of the building was 250 years old and the rumor was that the famous missionary in old California, Father Junípero Serra, had spread the gospel in this particular room by stripping Native Americans to the waist and flogging them until they accepted Jesus. Some of these unfortunates, the older students happily told the younger, never survived their conversion and their ghosts continued to hang out in cells, well, rooms, like this one.

Jamie Turner, the youngster who was presently ignoring spirits and keying at the speed of light, was a gawky, dark-haired sophomore. He'd never gotten a grade below a 92 and, even though there were two months to go until the end of term, he had completed the required reading – and most of the assignments – for all of his classes. He owned more books than any two students at St. Francis and had read the Harry Potter books five times each, Lord of the Rings eight times and every single word written by computer/science-fiction visionary William Gibson more often than he could remember.

Like muted machine-gun fire the sound of his keying filled the small room. He heard a creak behind him. Looked around fast. Nothing.

Then a snap. Silence. Now the sound of the wind.

Damn ghosts… Fuck 'em. Get back to work.

Jamie Turner shoved his heavy glasses up on his nose and returned to his task. Gray light from the misty day was bleeding through the barred windows. Outside on the soccer field his classmates were shouting, laughing, scoring goals, racing back and forth. The 9:30 physical ed period had just started. Jamie was supposed to be with them and Booty wouldn't like him hiding out here.

But Booty didn't know.

Not that Jamie disliked the principal of the boarding school. Not at all, really. It was hard to dislike somebody who cared about him. (Unlike, say, for instance, hellll-ohhh, Jamie's parents. "See you on the twenty-third, son… Oh,

And, for instance, refusing to let the boys go to harmless rock concerts with their older and way responsible brothers unless their parents had signed a permission slip, when who knew where the hell your parents even were, let alone getting them to spend a few minutes to sign something and fax it back to you in time, no matter how important it was.

Love you, bye…

But now Jamie was taking matters into his own hands. His brother, Mark, a sound engineer at an Oakland concert venue, had told Jamie that if he could escape from St. Francis that night he'd get the boy into the Santana concert and could probably get his hands on a couple of unlimited-access backstage passes. But if he wasn't out of the school by six-thirty his brother'd have to leave to get to work on time. And meeting that deadline was a problem. Because getting out of St. Francis wasn't like sliding down a bedsheet rope, the way kids in old movies snuck out for the night. St. Francis may have looked like an old Spanish castle but its security was totally high-tech.

Jamie could get out of his room, of course; that wasn't locked, even at night (St. Francis wasn't exactly a prison). And he could get out of the building proper through the fire door – provided he could disable the fire alarm. But that would only get him onto the school grounds. And they were surrounded by a twelve-foot-high stone wall, topped with barbed wire. And there was no way to get over that -at least no way for him, a chubby geek who hated heights – unless he cracked the passcode to one of the gates that opened onto the street. Which is why he was now cracking the passcode file of Herr Mein Fuhrer Booty, excuse me, Dr. Willem C. Boethe, M.Ed., Ph.D.

So far he'd easily hacked into Booty's computer and downloaded the file containing the passcode (conveniently named, "Security Passcodes." Hey, way subtle, Booty!).

What was stored in the file was, of course, an encrypted version of the password and would have to be decrypted before Jamie could use it. But Jamie's puny clone computer would take days to crack the code and so the boy was presently hacking into a nearby computer site to find a machine powerful enough to crack it in time for the magic deadline.

Jamie knew that the Internet had been started as a largely academic network to facilitate the exchange of research, not keep information secret. The first organizations to be linked via the Net – universities – had far poorer security than the government agencies and corporations that had more recently come online.

He now figuratively knocked on the door of Northern California Tech and Engineering College 's computer lab and was greeted with this:

Username?

Jamie answered: User.

Passcode?

His response: User.

And the message popped up:

Welcome, User.

Hm, how 'bout an F minus for security, Jamie thought wryly and began to browse through the machine's root directory – the main one – until he found what would be a very large supercomputer, probably an old Cray, on the school's network. At the moment the machine was calculating the age of the universe. Interesting, but not as cool as Santana, Jamie thought. He nudged aside the astronomy project and uploaded a program he himself had written, called Crack-er, which started its sweat labor to extract the English-language password from Booty's files. He-

"Oh, hell shit," he said in very un-Booty language. His computer had frozen up again.

This had occurred several times recently and it pissed him off that he couldn't figure out why. He knew computers cold and he could find no reason for this sort of jamming. He had no time for crashes, not today, with his 6:30 deadline. Still, the boy jotted the occurrence in his hacker's notebook, as any diligent codeslinger would do, and restarted the system then logged back online.

He checked on the Cray and found that the college's computer had kept working away, running Crack-er on Booty's password file, even while he'd been offline.

He could--

"Mr. Turner, Mr. Turner," came a nearby voice. "What are we up to here?"

The words scared the absolute hell out of Jamie. But he wasn't so startled that he failed to hit ALT-F6 on his computer just before Principal Booty padded up to the computer terminal on his crepe-soled shoes.

A screen containing an essay about the plight of the rain forest replaced the status report from his illegal cracking program.

"Hi, Mr. Boethe," Jamie said.

"Ah." The tall, thin man bent down, peering at the screen. "Thought you might be looking at nasty pictures, Mr. Turner."

"No, sir," Jamie said. "I wouldn't do that."

"Studying the environment, concerned about what we've done to poor Mother Nature, are we? Good for you, good for you. But I can't help but notice that this is your physical education period. You should be experiencing Mother Nature firsthand. Out in the sports fields. Inhaling that good California air. Running and kicking goals."

"Isn't it raining?" Jamie asked.

"Misting, I'd call it. Besides, playing soccer in the rain builds character. Now, out we go, Mr. Turner. The greens are down one player. Mr. Lochnell turned left and his ankle turned right. Go to their aid. Your team needs you."

"I just have to shut down the system, sir. It'll take a few minutes."

The principal walked to the door, calling, "I expect to see you out there in full gear in fifteen minutes."

"Yessir," responded Jamie Turner, not revealing his huge disappointment at forsaking his machine for a muddy patch of grass and a dozen stupid students.

Alt-F6ing out of the rain forest window, Jamie started to type a status request to see how his Crack-er program was doing on the passcode file. Then he paused, squinted at the screen and noticed something odd. The type on the monitor seemed slightly fuzzier than normal. The letters seemed to flicker too.

And something else: the keys were a little sluggish under his touch.

This was way weird. He wondered what the problem might be. Jamie had written a couple of diagnostic programs and he decided he'd run one or two of them after he'd extracted the passcode. They might tell him what was wrong.

He guessed the trouble was a bug in the system folder, maybe a graphics accelerator problem. He'd check that first.

But for a brief instant Jamie Turner had a ridiculous thought: that the unclear letters and slow response times of the keys weren't a problem with his operating system at all. They were due to the ghost of a long-dead Indian, floating in between Jamie and his machine, angry at the human presence as the spirit's cold, spectral fingers keyed in a desperate message for help.

CHAPTER 00000101 / FIVE

At the top left-hand corner of Phate's screen was a small dialogue box containing this:

Trapdoor – Hunt Mode

Target: JamieTT6hol.com

Online: Yes

Operating system: MS-DOS/Windows

Antivirus software: Disabled

On the screen itself Phate was looking at exactly what Jamie Turner was seeing on his own machine, several miles away, in St. Francis Academy.

This particular character in his game had intrigued Phate from the first time he'd invaded the boy's machine, a month ago.

Phate had spent a lot of time browsing through Jamie's files and he'd learned as much about him as he'd learned about the late Lara Gibson.

For instance:

Jamie Turner hated sports and history and loved math and science. He read voraciously. The youngster was a MUDhead – he spent hours in the Multiuser Domain chat rooms on the Internet, excelling at role-playing games and active in creating and maintaining the fantasy societies so popular in the MUD realm. Jamie was also a brilliant codeslinger – a self-taught programmer. He'd designed his own Web site, which had gotten a runner-up prize from Web Site Revue Online. He'd come up with an idea for a new computer game that Phate found intriguing and that clearly had commercial potential.

The boy's biggest fear was losing his eyesight; he ordered special shatterproof glasses from an online optometrist.

The only member of his family he spent much time e-mailing and communicating with was his older brother Mark. Their parents were rich and busy and tended to respond to every fifth or sixth e-mail their son sent.

Jamie Turner, Phate had concluded, was brilliant and imaginative and vulnerable.

And the boy was also just the sort of hacker who'd one day surpass him.

Phate – like many of the great computer wizards – had a mystical side to him. He was like those physicists who accept God wholeheartedly or hard-headed politicians who're devoutly committed to Masonic mysticism. There was, Phate believed, an indescribably spiritual side to machines and only those with limited vision denied that.

So it wasn't at all out of character for Phate to be superstitious. And one of the things that he'd come to believe, as he'd used Trapdoor to stroll through Jamie Turner's computer over the past few weeks, was that the boy had the skill to ultimately replace Phate as the greatest codeslinger of all time.

This was why he had to stop little Jamie T. Turner from continuing his adventures in the Machine World. And Phate planned to stop him in a particularly effective way.

He now scrolled through more files. These, which had been e-mailed to him by Shawn, gave detailed information about the boy's school – St. Francis Academy.

The boarding school was renowned academically but, more important, it represented a true tactical challenge to Phate. If there was no difficulty – and risk to him – in killing the characters in the game then there was no point in playing. And St. Francis offered some serious obstacles. The security was very extensive because the school had been the scene of a break-in several years ago in which one student had been killed and a teacher severely wounded. The principal, Willem Boethe, had vowed to never let that happen again. To reassure parents, he had renovated the entire school and turned it into a fortress. Halls were locked down at night, the grounds double-gated, windows and doors alarmed. You needed passcodes to get in and out of the tall razor-wired wall surrounding the compound.

Getting inside the school was, in short, just the right kind of challenge for Phate. It was a step up from Lara Gibson – moving to a higher, more difficult level in his game. He coulda-

Phate squinted at the screen. Oh, no, not again. Jamie's computer – and therefore his too – had crashed. It'd happened just ten minutes ago too. This was the onebug in Trapdoor. Sometimes his machine and the invaded computer would simply stop working. Then they'd both have to reboot – restart – their computers and go back online.

It resulted in a delay of no more than a minute or so but to Phate it was a terrible flaw. Software had to be perfect, it had to be elegant. He and Shawn had been trying to fix this bug for months but had had no luck so far.

A moment later he and his young friend were back online and Phate was browsing through the boy's machine once more.

A small window appeared on Phate's monitor and the Trapdoor program asked:

Target subject has received an instant message from

MarkTheMan. Do you want to monitor?

That would be Jamie Turner's brother, Mark. Phate keyed Yand saw the brothers' dialogue on his screen.

MarkTheMan: Can you instant message?

JamieTT: Gotta go play sucker I mean SOCCER.

MarkTheMan: LOL. Still on for tonight?

JamieTT: You bet. Santana RULES!!!!!

MarkTheMan: Can't wait. I'll see you across the street

by the north gate at 6:30. You ready to rock n roll?

Phate thought, You bet we are.

Wyatt Gillette paused in the doorway and felt as if he'd been transported back in time.

He gazed around him at the California State Police Computer Crimes Unit, which was housed in an old one-story building several miles from the state police's San Jose headquarters. "It's a dinosaur pen."

"Of our very own," Andy Anderson said. He then explained to Bishop and Shelton, neither of whom seemed to want the information, that in the early computing days huge computers like the mainframes made by IBM and Control Data Corporation were housed in special rooms like this, called dinosaur pens.

The pens featured raised floors, beneath which ran massive cables called "boas," after the snakes, which they resembled (and which had been known to uncurl violently at times and injure technicians). Dozens of air conditioner ducts also criss-crossed the room – the cooling systems were necessary to keep the massive computers from overheating and catching fire.

The Computer Crimes Unit was located off West San Carlos, in a low-rent commercial district of San Jose, near the town of Santa Clara. To reach it you drove past a number of car dealerships – EZ TERMS FOR YOU! SE HABLA ESPANOL – and over a series of railroad tracks. The rambling one-story building, in need of painting and repair, was in clear contrast to, say, Apple Computer headquarters a mile away, a pristine, futuristic building decorated with a forty-foot portrait of cofounder Steve Wozniak. CCU's only artwork was a broken, rusty Pepsi machine, squatting beside the front door.

Inside the huge building were dozens of dark corridors and empty offices. The police were using only a small portion of the space – the central work area, in which a dozen modular cubicles had been assembled. There were eight Sun Microsystems workstations, several IBMs and Apples, a dozen laptops. Cables ran everywhere, some duct-taped to the floor, some hanging overhead like jungle vines.

"You can rent these old data-processing facilities for a song," Anderson explained to Gillette. He laughed. "The CCU finally gets recognized as a legit part of the state police and they give us digs that're twenty years out of date."

"Look, a scram switch." Gillette nodded at a red switch on the wall. A dusty sign said EMERGENCY USE ONLY. "I've never seen one."

"What's that?" Bob Shelton asked.

Anderson explained: The old mainframes would get so hot that if the cooling system went down the computers could overheat and catch fire in seconds. With all the resins and plastic and rubber the gases from a burning computer would kill you before the flames would. So all dinosaur pens came equipped with a scram switch – the name borrowed from the emergency shutdown switch in nuclear reactors. If there was a fire you hit the scram button, which shut off the computer, summoned the fire department and dumped halon gas on the machine to extinguish the flames.

Andy Anderson introduced Gillette, Bishop and Shelton to the CCU team. First, Linda Sanchez, a short, stocky, middle-aged Latina in a lumpy tan suit. She was the unit's SSL officer – seizure, search and logging, she explained. She was the one who secured a perpetrator's computer, checked it for booby traps, copied the files and logged hardware and software into evidence. She also was a digital evidence recovery specialist, an expert at "excavating" a hard drive – searching it for hidden or erased data (accordingly, such officers were also known as computer archaeologists). "I'm the team bloodhound," she explained to Gillette.

"Any word, Linda?"

"Not yet, boss. That daughter of mine, she's the laziest girl on earth."

Anderson said to Gillette, "Linda's about to be a grandmother."

"A week overdue. Driving the family crazy."

"And this is my second in command, Sergeant Stephen Miller."

Miller was older than Anderson, close to fifty. He had bushy, graying hair. Sloping shoulders, bearish, pear-shaped. He seemed cautious. Because of his age, Gillette guessed he was from the second generation of computer programmers – men and women who were innovators in the computer world in the early seventies.

The third person was Tony Mott, a cheerful thirty-year-old with long, straight blond hair and Oakley sunglasses dangling from a green fluorescent cord around his neck. His cubicle was filled with pictures of him and a pretty Asian girl, snowboarding and mountain biking. A crash helmet sat on his desk, snowboarding boots in the corner. He'd represent the latest generation of hackers: athletic risk-takers, equally at home hacking together script at a keyboard and skateboarding half-pipes at extreme-sport competitions. Gillette noticed too that of all the cops at CCU Mott wore the biggest pistol on his hip – a shiny silver automatic.

The Computer Crimes Unit also had a receptionist but the woman was out sick. CCU was low in the state police hierarchy (it was referred to as the "Geek Squad" by fellow cops) and headquarters wouldn't spring for a temporary replacement. The members of the unit had to take phone messages, sift through mail and file documents by themselves and none of them, understandably, was very happy about this.

Then Gillette's eyes slipped to one of several erasable white-boards, against the wall, apparently used for listing clues. A photo was taped to one. He couldn't make out what it depicted and walked closer. Then he gasped and stopped in shock. The photo was of a young woman in an orange-and-red skirt, naked from the waist up, bloody and pale, lying in a patch of grass, dead. Gillette had played plenty of computer games – Mortal Kombat and Doom and Tomb Raider – but, as gruesome as those games were, they were nothing compared to this still, horrible violence against a real victim.

Andy Anderson glanced at the wall clock, which wasn't digital, as would befit a computer center, but an old, dusty analog model – with big and little hands. The time was 10:00 A.M. The cop said, "We've got to get moving on this… Now, we're taking a two-prong approach to the case. Detectives Bishop and Shelton are going to be running a standard homicide investigation. CCU'll handle the computer evidence – with Wyatt's help here." He glanced at a fax on his desk and added, "We're also expecting a consultant from Seattle, an expert on the Internet and online systems. Patricia Nolan. She should be here any minute."

"Police?" Shelton asked.

"No, civilian," Anderson said.

Miller added, "We use corporate security people all the time. The technology changes so fast we can't keep up with all the latest developments. Perps're always one step ahead of us. So we try to use private consultants whenever we can."

Tony Mott said, "They're usually standing in line to help. It's real chic now to put catching a hacker on your resume."

Anderson asked Linda Sanchez, "Now, where's the Gibson woman's computer?"

"In the analysis lab, boss." The woman nodded down one of the dark corridors that spidered out from the central room. "A couple of techs from crime scene are fingerprinting it -just in case the perp broke into her house and left some nice, juicy latents. Should be ready in ten minutes."

Mott handed Frank Bishop an envelope. "This came for you a few minutes ago. It's the preliminary crime scene report."

Bishop brushed at his stiff hair with the backs of his fingers. Gillette could see the tooth marks from the comb very clearly in the heavily sprayed strands. The cop glanced through the file but said nothing. He handed the thin stack of papers to Shelton, tucked his shirt in once more then leaned against the wall.

The chunky cop opened the file, read for a few moments then looked up. "Witnesses report the perpetrator was a white male, medium build and medium height, white slacks, a light blue shirt, tie with a cartoon character of some kind on it. Late twenties, early thirties. Looked like every techie in there, the bartender said." The cop walked to the whiteboard and began to write down these clues. He continued. "ID card around his neck said Xerox Palo Alto Research Center but we're sure that was fake. There were no hard leads to anybody there. He had a mustache and goatee. Blond hair. Also there were several frayed blue denim fibers on the victim that didn't match her clothes or anything in her closet at home. Might've come from the perp. The murder weapon was probably a military Ka-bar knife with a serrated top."

Tony Mott asked, "How'd you know that?"

"The wounds're consistent with that type of weapon." Shelton turned back to the file. "The victim was killed elsewhere and dumped by the highway."

Mott interrupted. "How could they tell that?"

Shelton frowned slightly, apparently not wishing to digress. "Quantity of her blood found at the scene." The young cop's lengthy blond hair danced as he nodded and seemed to record this information for future reference.

Shelton resumed. "Nobody near the body drop site saw anything." A sour glance at the others. "Like they ever do… Now, we're trying to trace the doer's car – he and Lara left the bar together and were seen walking toward the back parking lot but nobody got a look at his wheels. Crime scene was lucky; the bartender remembered that the perp wrapped his beer bottle in a napkin and one of the techs found it in the trash. But we printed both the bottle and the napkin and came up with zip. The lab lifted some kind of adhesive off the lip of the bottle but we can't tell what it is. It's nontoxic. That's all they know. It doesn't match anything in the lab database."

Frank Bishop finally spoke. "A costume store."

"Costume?" Anderson asked.

The cop said, "Maybe he needed some help to look like this Will Randolph guy he was impersonating. Might be glue for a fake mustache or beard."

Gillette agreed. "A good social engineer always dresses for the con. I have friends who've sewed together complete Pac Bell linemen uniforms."

"That's good," Tony Mott said to Bishop, adding more data to his continuing education file.

Anderson nodded his approval of this suggestion. Shelton called homicide headquarters in San Jose and arranged to have some troopers check the adhesive against samples of theatrical glue.

Frank Bishop took off his wrinkled suit jacket and hung it carefully on the back of a chair. He stared at the photo and the white-board, arms crossed. His shirt was already billowing out again. He wore boots with pointed toes. When Gillette was a college student he and some friends at Berkeley had rented a skin flick for a party – a stag film from the fifties or sixties. One of the actors had looked and dressed just like Bishop.

Lifting the crime scene file away from Shelton, Bishop flipped through it. Then he looked up. "The bartender said that the victim had a martini and the killer had a light beer. The killer paid. If we can get a hold of the check we might lift a fingerprint."

"How're you going to do that?" It was bulky Stephen Miller who asked this. "The bartender probably pitched them out last night – with a thousand others."

Bishop nodded at Gillette. "We'll have some troopers do what hementioned – Dumpster diving." To Shelton he said, "Have them look through the bar's trash bins for a receipt for a martini and a light beer, time-stamped about seven-thirty P.M."

"That'll take forever," Miller said. But Bishop ignored him and nodded to Shelton, who made the call to follow up on his suggestion.

Gillette then realized that nobody had been standing close to him. He eyed everyone else's clean clothes, shampooed hair, grime-free fingernails. He asked Anderson, "If we've got a few minutes before that computer's ready… I don't suppose you have a shower 'round here?"

Anderson tugged at the lobe that bore the stigmata of a past-life earring and broke into a laugh. "I was wondering how to bring that up." He said to Mott, "Take him down to the employee locker room. But stay close."

The young cop nodded and led Gillette down the hallway. He chattered away nonstop – his first topic the advantages of the Linux operating system, a variation on the classic Unix, which many people were starting to use in place of Windows. He spoke enthusiastically and was well informed.

He then told Gillette about the recent formation of the Computer Crimes Unit. They'd been in existence for less than a year. The Geek Squad, Mott explained, could easily have used another half-dozen full-time cops but they weren't in the budget. There were more cases than they could possibly handle – from hacking to cyberstalking to child pornography to copyright infringement of software – and the workload seemed to get heavier with every passing month.

"Why'd you get into it?" Gillette asked him. "CCU?"

"Hoping for a little excitement. I mean, I love machines and guess I have a mind for 'em but sifting through code to find a copyright violation's not quite what I'd hoped. I thought it'd be a little more rig and rage, you know."

"How 'bout Linda Sanchez?" Gillette asked. "She a geek?"

"Not really. She's smart but machines aren't in her blood. She was a gang girl down in Lettuce Land, you know, Salinas. Then she went into social work and decided to go to the academy. Her partner was shot up pretty bad in Monterey a few years ago. Linda has kids – the daughter who's expecting and a girl in high school – and her husband's never home. He's an INS agent. So she figured it was time to move to a little quieter side of the business."

"Just the opposite of you."

Mott laughed. "I guess so."

As Gillette toweled off after the shower Mott placed an extra set of his own workout clothes on the bench for the hacker. T-shirt, black sweatpants and a warm-up wind-breaker. Mott was shorter than Gillette but they had basically the same build.

"Thanks," Gillette said, donning the clothes. He felt exhilarated, having washed away one particular type of filth from his thin frame: the residue of prison.

On the way back to the main room they passed a small kitchenette. There was a coffeepot, a refrigerator and a table on which sat a plate of bagels. Gillette stopped, looked hungrily at the food. Then he eyed a row of cabinets.

He asked Mott, "I don't suppose you have any Pop-Tarts in there."

"Pop-Tarts? Naw. But have a bagel."

Gillette walked over to the table and poured a cup of coffee. He picked up a raisin bagel.

"Not one of those," Mott said. He took it out of Gillette's hand and dropped it on the floor. It bounced like a ball.

Gillette frowned.

"Linda brought these in. It's a joke." When Gillette stared at him in confusion the cop added, "Don't you get it?"

"Get what?"

"What's today's date?"

"I don't have a clue." The days of the month aren't how you mark time in prison.

"April Fools' Day," Mott said. "Those bagels're plastic. Linda and I put 'em out this morning and we've been waiting for Andy to bite – so to speak – but we haven't got him yet. I think he's on a diet." He opened the cabinet and took out a bag of fresh ones. "Here."

Gillette ate one quickly. Mott said, "Go ahead. Have another."

Another followed, washed down with gulps from the large cup of coffee. They were the best thing he'd had in ages.

Mott got a carrot juice from the fridge and they returned to the main area of CCU.

Gillette looked around the dinosaur pen, at the hundreds of disconnected boas lying in the corners and at the air-conditioning vents, his mind churning. A thought occurred to him. "April Fools' Day… so the murder was March thirty-first?"

"Right," Anderson confirmed. "Is that significant?"

Gillette said uncertainly, "It's probably a coincidence."

"Go ahead."

"Well, it's just that March thirty-first is sort of a red-letter day in computer history."

Bishop asked, "Why?"

A woman's gravelly voice spoke from the doorway. "Isn't that the date the first Univac was delivered?"

CHAPTER 00000110 / SIX

They turned to see a hippy brunette in her mid-thirties, wearing an unfortunate gray sweater suit and thick black shoes.

Anderson asked, "Patricia?"

She nodded and walked into the room, shook his hand.

"This's Patricia Nolan, the consultant I was telling you about. She's with the security department of Horizon On-Line."

Horizon was the biggest commercial Internet service provider in the world, larger even than America Online. Since there were tens of millions of registered subscribers and since every one of them could have up to eight different usernames for friends or family members it was likely that, at any given time, a large percentage of the world was checking stock quotes, lying to people in chat rooms, reading Hollywood gossip, buying things, finding out the weather, reading and sending e-mails and downloading soft-core porn via Horizon On-Line.

Nolan kept her eyes on Gillette's face for a moment. She glanced at the palm tree tattoo. Then at his fingers, keying compulsively in the air.

Anderson explained, "Horizon called us when they heard the victim was a customer and volunteered to send somebody to help out."

The detective introduced her to the team and now Gillette examined her. The trendy designer eyeglasses, probably bought on impulse, didn't do much to make her masculine, plain face any less plain. But the striking green eyes behind them were piercing and very quick – Gillette could see that she too was amused to find herself in an antiquated dinosaur pen. Nolan's complexion was loose and doughy and obscured with thick makeup that would have been stylish – if excessive – in the 1970s. Her brunette hair was very thick and unruly and tended to fall into her face.

After hands were shaken and introductions made she returned immediately to Gillette. She twined a mass of hair around her fingers and, not caring who heard, said bluntly, "I saw the way you looked at me when you heard I worked for Horizon."

Like all big commercial Internet service providers – AOL, CompuServe, Prodigy and the others – Horizon On-Line was held in contempt by true hackers. Computer wizards used telnet programs to jump directly from their computers to others' and they roamed the Blue Nowhere with customized Web browsers built for interstellar travel. They wouldn't think of using simple-minded, low-horsepower Internet providers like Horizon, which was geared for family entertainment.

Subscribers to Horizon On-Line were known as HOLamers or HOLosers. Or, echoing Gillette's current address, just plain HOs.

Nolan continued, speaking to Gillette. "Just so we get everything on the table, I went to MIT undergrad and Princeton for my masters and doctorate – both in computer science."

"AI?" Gillette asked. "In New Jersey?"

Princeton 's artificial intelligence lab was one of the top in the country. Nolan nodded. "That's right. And I've done my share of hacking too."

Gillette was amused that she was justifying herself to him, the one felon in the crowd, and not to the police. He could hear an edgy tone in her voice and the delivery sounded rehearsed. He supposed this was because she was a woman; the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission doesn't have jurisdiction to stop the relentless prejudice against women trying to make their way in the Blue Nowhere. Not only are they hounded out of chat rooms and off bulletin boards but they're often blatantly insulted and even threatened. Teenage girls who want to hack need to be smarter and ten times tougher than their male counterparts.

"What were you saying about Univac?" Tony Mott asked.

Nolan filled in, "March 31, 1951. The first Univac was delivered to the Census Bureau for regular operations."

"What was it?" Bob Shelton asked.

"It stands for Universal Automatic Computer."

Gillette said, "Acronyms're real popular in the Machine World."

Nolan said, "Univac is one of the first modern mainframe computers, as we know them. It took up a room as big as this one. Of course nowadays you can buy laptops that're faster and do a hundred times more."

Anderson mused, "The date? Think it's a coincidence?"

Nolan shrugged. "I don't know."

"Maybe our perp's got a theme of some kind," Mott suggested. "I mean, a milestone computer date and a motiveless killing right in the heart of Silicon Valley."

"Let's follow up on it," Anderson said. "Find out if there're any recent unsolved killings in other high-tech areas that fit this M.O. Try Seattle, Portland – they have the Silicon Forest there. Chicago 's got the Silicon Prairie. Route 128 outside of Boston."

" Austin, Texas," Miller suggested.

"Good. And the Dulles Toll Road corridor outside of D.C. Start there and let's see what we can find. Send the request to VICAP."

Tony Mott keyed in some information and a few minutes later he got a response. He read from the screen and said, "Got something in Portland. February fifteenth and seventeenth of this year. Two unsolved killings, same M.O. in both of them, and it was similar to here – both victims stabbed to death, died of chest wounds. Perp was believed to be a white male, late twenties. Didn't seem to know the victims and robbery and rape weren't motives. The vics were a wealthy corporate executive – male – and a professional woman athlete."

"February fifteenth?" Gillette asked.

Patricia Nolan glanced at him. "ENIAC?"

"Right," the hacker said then explained: "ENIAC was similar to Univac but earlier. It came online in the forties. The dedication date was February fifteenth."

"What's that acronym?"

Gillette said, "The Electronic Numerical Integrator and Calculator." Like all hackers he was an aficionado of computer history.

"Shit," Shelton muttered, "we've got a pattern doer. Great."

Another message arrived from VICAR Gillette glanced at the screen and learned that these letters stood for the Department of Justice's Violent Criminal Apprehension Program.

It seemed that cops used acronyms as much as hackers.

"Man, here's one more," Mott said, reading the screen.

"More?" Stephen Miller asked, dismayed. He absently organized some of the disks and papers that covered his desk six inches deep.

"About eighteen months ago a diplomat and a colonel at the Pentagon – both of them with bodyguards – were killed in Herndon, Virginia. That's the Dulles Toll Road high-tech corridor… I'm ordering the complete files."

"What were the dates of the Virginia killings?" Anderson asked.

"August twelfth and thirteenth."

He wrote this on the white-board and looked at Gillette with a raised eyebrow. "Any clue?"

"IBM's first PC," the hacker replied. "The release date was August twelfth." Nolan nodded.

"So he's got a theme," Shelton said.

Frank Bishop added, "And that means he's going to keep going."

The computer terminal where Mott sat gave a soft beep. The young cop leaned forward, his large automatic pistol clanking loudly against his chair. He frowned. "We've got a problem here."

On the screen were the words:

Unable to Download Files

A longer message was beneath it.

Anderson read the text, shook his head. "The case files at VICAP on the Portland and Virginia killings're missing. The note from the sysadmin says they were damaged in a data-storage mishap."

"Mishap," Nolan muttered, sharing a look with Gillette.

Linda Sanchez, eyes wide, said, "You don't think… I mean, he couldn't've cracked VICAP. Nobody's ever done that."

Anderson said to the younger cop, "Try the state databases: Oregon and Virginia state police case archives."

In a moment Mott looked up. "No record of any files on those cases. They vanished."

Mott and Miller eyed each other uncertainly. "This's getting scary," Mott said.

Anderson mused, "But what's his motive?"

"He's a goddamn hacker," Shelton muttered. "That's his motive."

"He's not a hacker," Gillette said.

"Then what is he?"

Gillette didn't feel like educating the difficult cop. He glanced at Anderson, who explained, "The word 'hacker' is a compliment. It means an innovative programmer. As in 'hacking together' software. A real hacker breaks into somebody's machine only to see if he can do it and to find out what's inside – it's a curiosity thing. The hacker ethic is it's okay to look but don't touch. People who break into systems as vandals or thieves are called 'crackers.' As in safecrackers."

"I wouldn't even call him that," Gillette said. "Crackers maybe steal and vandalize but they don't hurt people. I'd call him a 'kracker' with a k. For killer."

"Cracker with a c, kracker with a k" Shelton muttered. "What the hell difference does it make?"

"A big difference," Gillette said. "Spell 'phreak' with a ph and you're talking about somebody who steals phone services. 'Phishing' – with a ph – is searching the Net for someone's identity. Misspell 'wares' with a z on the end, not an s, and you're not talking about housewares but about stolen software. When it comes to hacking it's all in the spelling."

Shelton shrugged and remained unimpressed by the distinction.

The identification techs from the California State Police Forensics Division returned to the main part of the CCU office, wheeling battered suitcases behind them. One consulted a sheet of paper. "We lifted eighteen partial latents, twelve partial visibles." He nodded at a laptop computer case slung over his shoulder. "We scanned them and it looks like they're all the victim's or her boyfriend's. And there was no evidence of glove smears on the keys."

"So," Anderson said, "he got inside her system from a remote location. Soft access – like we thought." He thanked the techs and they left.

Then Linda Sanchez – all business at the moment, no longer the grandmother-to-be – said to Gillette, "I've secured and logged everything in her machine." She handed him a floppy disk. "Here's a boot disk."

This was a disk that contained enough of an operating system to "boot up," or start, a suspect's computer. Police used boot disks, rather than the hard drive itself, to start the computer in case the owner – or the killer, in this case – had installed some software on the hard drive that would destroy data.

"I've been through her machine three times now and I haven't found any booby traps but that doesn't mean they aren't there. You probably know all this too but keep the victim's machine and any disks away from plastic bags or boxes or folders – they can create static and zap data. Same thing with speakers. They have magnets in them. And don't put any disks on metal shelves – they might be magnetized. You'll find nonmagnetic tools in the lab. I guess you know what to do from here."

"Yep."

She said, "Good luck. The lab's down that corridor there."

The boot disk in hand, Gillette started toward the hallway.

Bob Shelton followed.

The hacker turned. "I don't really want anybody looking over my shoulder."

Especially you, he added to himself.

"It's okay," Anderson said to the Homicide cop. "The only exit back there's alarmed and he's got his jewelry on." Nodding at the shiny metal transmission anklet. "He's not going anywhere."

Shelton wasn't pleased but he acquiesced. Gillette noticed, though, that he didn't return to the main room. He leaned against the hallway wall near the lab and crossed his arms, looking like a bouncer with a bad attitude.

If you even get an itchy look that I don't like you're going to get hurt bad…

Inside the analysis room Gillette walked up to Lara Gibson's computer. It was an unremarkable, off-the-shelf IBM clone.

He did nothing with her machine just yet, though. Instead he sat down at a workstation and wrote a kludge – a down-and-dirty software program. In five minutes he was finished writing the source code. He named the program Detective then compiled and copied it to the boot disk Sanchez had given him. He inserted the disk into the floppy drive of Lara Gibson's machine. He turned on the power switch and the drives hummed and snapped with comforting familiarity.

Wyatt Gillette's thick, muscular fingers slid eagerly onto the cool plastic of the keys. He positioned his fingertips, callused from years of keyboarding, on the tiny orientation bumps on the F and J keys. The boot disk bypassed the machine's Windows operating system and went straight to the leaner MS-DOS – the famous Microsoft Disk Operating System, which is the basis for the more user-friendly Windows. The C: prompt appeared on the black screen.

His heart raced as he stared at the hypnotically pulsing cursor.

Then, not looking at the keyboard, he pressed a key, the one for d-the first letter in the command line, detective.exe, which would start his program.

In the Blue Nowhere time is very different from what we know it to be in the Real World and, in the first thousandth of a second after Wyatt Gillette pushed that key, this happened:

The voltage flowing through the circuit beneath the d key changed ever so slightly.

The keyboard processor noticed the change in current and transmitted an interrupt signal to the computer itself, which momentarily sent the dozens of tasks it was currently performing to a storage area known as the stack and then created a special priority route for codes coming from the keyboard.

The code for the letter d was directed by the keyboard processor along this express route into the computer's basic input-output system – the BIOS – which checked to see if Wyatt Gillette had pressed the SHIFT, CONTROL or ALTERNATE keys at the same time he'd hit the d key.

Assured that he hadn't, the BIOS translated the letter's keyboard code for the lowercase d into another one, its ASCII code, which was then sent into the computer's graphics adapter.

The adapter in turn converted the code to a digital signal, which it forwarded to the electron guns located in the back of the monitor.

The guns fired a burst of energy into the chemical coating on the screen. And, miraculously, the white letter d burned into existence on the black monitor.

All this in that fraction of a second.

And in what remained of that second Gillette typed the rest of the letters of his command, e-t-e-c-t-i-v-e.e-x-e, and then hit the ENTER key with his right little finger.

More type and graphics appeared, and soon, like a surgeon on the trail of an elusive tumor, Wyatt Gillette began probing carefully through Lara Gibson's computer – the only aspect of the woman that had survived the vicious attack, that was still warm, that retained at least a few memories of who she was and what she'd done in her brief life.

CHAPTER 00000111 / SEVEN

He walks in a hacker's slump, Andy Anderson thought, watching Wyatt Gillette return from the analysis lab.

Machine people had the worst posture of any profession in the world.

It was nearly 11:00 A.M. The hacker had spent only thirty minutes looking over Lara Gibson's machine.

Bob Shelton, who now dogged Gillette back to the main office, to the hacker's obvious irritation, asked, "So what'd you find?" The question was delivered in a chilly tone and Anderson wondered again why Shelton was riding the young man so hard – especially considering that the hacker was helping them out on a case the detective had volunteered for.

Gillette ignored the pock-faced cop and sat down in a swivel chair, flipped open his notebook. When he spoke it was to Anderson. "There's something odd going on. The killer was in her computer. He seized root and-"

"Dumb it down," Shelton muttered. "Seized what?"

Gillette explained, "When somebody has root that means they have complete control over a computer network and all the machines on it."

Anderson added, "When you're root you can rewrite programs, delete files, add authorized users, remove them, go online as somebody else."

Gillette continued, "But I can't figure out how he did it. The only thing unusual I found were some scrambled files – I thought they were some kind of encrypted virus but they turned out to be just gibberish. There's not a trace of any kind of software on her machine that would let him get inside."

Glancing at Bishop, he explained, "See, I could load a virus in your computer that'd let me seize root on your machine and get inside it from wherever I am, whenever I want to, without needing a passcode. They're called 'back door' viruses – as in sneaking in through the back door.

"But in order for them to work I have to somehow actually install the software on your computer and activate it. I could send it to you as an attachment to an e-mail, say, and you could activate it by opening the attachment without knowing what it was. Or I could break into your house and install it on your computer then activate it myself. But there's no evidence that happened. No, he seized root some other way."

The hacker was an animated speaker, Anderson noticed. His eyes were glowing with that absorbed animation he'd seen in so many young geeks – even the ones who were sitting in court, more or less convicting themselves as they excitedly described their exploits to the judge and jury.

"Then how do you know he seized root?" Linda Sanchez asked.

"I hacked together this kludge." He handed Anderson a floppy disk.

"What's it do?" Patricia Nolan asked, her professional curiosity piqued, as was Anderson 's.

"It's called Detective. It looks for things that aren't inside a computer." He explained for the benefit of the non-CCU cops. "When your computer runs, the operating system -like Windows – stores parts of the programs it needs all over your hard drive. There're patterns to where and when it stores those files." Indicating the disk, he said, "That showed me that a lot of those bits of programs'd been moved to places on the hard drive that make sense only if somebody was going through her computer from a remote location."

Shelton shook his head in confusion.

But Frank Bishop said, "You mean, it's like you know a burglar was inside your house because he moved furniture and didn't put the pieces back. Even though he was gone when you got home."

Gillette nodded. "Exactly."

Andy Anderson – as much a wizard as Gillette in some areas – hefted the thin disk in his hand. He couldn't help feeling impressed. When he was considering asking Gillette to help them, the cop had looked through some of Gillette's script, which the prosecutor had submitted as evidence in the case against him. After examining the brilliant lines of source code Anderson had two thoughts. The first was that if anyone could figure out how the perp had gotten into Lara Gibson's computer it was Wyatt Gillette.

The second was pure, painful envy of the young man's skills. Throughout the world there were tens of thousands of code crunchers – people who happily churn out tight, efficient software for mundane tasks – and there were just as many script bunnies, the term for kids who write wildly creative but clumsy and largely useless programs just for the fun of it. But only a few programmers have both the vision to conceive of script that's "elegant," the highest form of praise for software, and the skill to write it. Wyatt Gillette was just such a codeslinger.

Once again Anderson noticed Frank Bishop looking around the room absently, his mind elsewhere. He wondered if he should call headquarters and see about getting a new detective on board. Let Bishop go chase his MARINKILL bank robbers – if that's what was so goddamn important to him – and we'll replace him with somebody who at least could pay attention.

The CCU cop said to Gillette, "So the bottom line is he got into her system thanks to some new, unknown program or virus."

"Basically, that's it."

"Could you find out anything else about him?" Mott asked.

"Only what you already know – that he's been trained on Unix."

Unix is a computer operating system, just like MS-DOS or Windows, though it controls larger, more powerful machines than personal computers.

"Wait," Anderson interrupted. "What do you mean, what we already know?"

"That mistake he made."

"What mistake?"

Gillette frowned. "When the killer was inside her system he keyed some commands to get into her files. But they were Unix commands – he must've entered them by mistake before he remembered her machine was running Windows. You must've seen them in there."

Anderson looked questioningly at Stephen Miller, who'd apparently been the one analyzing the victim's computer in the first place. Miller said uneasily, "I noticed a couple lines of Unix, yeah. But I just assumed she'd typed them."

"She's a civilian," Gillette said, using the hacker term for a casual computer user. "I doubt she'd even heard of Unix, let alone known the commands." In Windows and Apple operating systems people control their machines by simply clicking on pictures or typing common English words for commands; Unix requires users to learn hundreds of complicated codes.

"I didn't think, sorry," the bearish cop said defensively. He seemed put out at this criticism over what he must have thought was a small point.

So Stephen Miller had made yet another mistake, Anderson reflected. This had been an ongoing problem ever since Miller had joined CCU recently. In the 1970s Miller had headed a promising company that made computers and developed software. But his products were always one step behind IBM's, Digital Equipment's and Microsoft's and he eventually went bankrupt. Miller complained that he'd often anticipated the NBT (the "Next Big Thing" – the Silicon Valley phrase for an innovation that would revolutionize the industry) but the "big boys" were continually sabotaging him.

After his company went under he'd gotten divorced and left the Machine World for a few years, then surfaced as a freelance programmer. Miller drifted into computer security and finally applied to the state police. He wouldn't've been Anderson's first choice for a computer cop but, then again, CCU had very few qualified applicants to choose from (why earn $60,000 a year working a job where there's a chance you might get shot, when you can make ten times that at one of Silicon Valley's corporate legends?).

Besides, Miller – who'd never remarried and didn't seem to have much of a personal life – put in the longest hours in the department and could be found in the dinosaur pen long after everyone else had left. He also took work "home," that is, to some of the local university computer departments, where friends would let him run CCU projects on state-of-the-art supercomputers for free.

"What's that mean for us?" Shelton asked. "That he knows this Unix stuff."

Anderson said, "It's bad for us. That's what it means. Hackers who use Windows or Apple systems are usually small-time. Serious hackers work in Unix or Digital Equipment's operating system, VMS."

Gillette concurred. He added, "Unix is also the operating system of the Internet. Anybody who's going to crack into the big servers and routers on the Net has to know Unix."

Bishop's phone rang and he took the call. Then he looked around and sat down at a nearby workstation to jot notes. He sat upright; no hacker's slouch here, Anderson observed. When he disconnected the call Bishop said, "Got some leads. One of our troopers heard from some CIs."

It was a moment before Anderson recalled what the letters stood for. Confidential informants. Snitches.

Bishop said in his soft, unemotional voice, "Somebody named Peter Fowler, white male about twenty-five, from Bakersfield 's been seen selling guns in this area. Been hawking Ka-bars too." A nod at the white-board. "Like the murder weapon. He was seen an hour ago near the Stanford campus in Palo Alto. Some park near Page Mill, a quarter mile north of 280."

"Hacker's Knoll, boss," Linda Sanchez said. "In Milliken Park."

Anderson nodded. He knew the place well and wasn't surprised when Gillette said that he did too. It's a deserted grassy area near the campus where computer science majors, hackers and chip-jocks hang out. They trade warez and swap stories, smoke weed.

"I know some people there," Anderson said. "I'll go check it out when we're through here."

Bishop consulted his notes again and said, "The report from the lab shows that the adhesive on the bottle is the type of glue used in theatrical makeup. A couple of our people checked the phone book for stores. There's only one in the immediate area – Ollie's Theatrical Supply on El Camino Real in Mountain View. They sell a lot of the stuff, the clerk said. They don't keep records of the sales but they'll let us know if anybody comes in to buy some.

"Now," Bishop continued, "we might have a lead on the perp's car. A security guard in an office building across the street from Vesta's, the restaurant where he picked up the Gibson woman, noticed a late-model, light-colored sedan parked in the company lot around the time the victim was in the bar. He thought somebody was inside the sedan. If there was, the driver may've gotten a good view of the perp's vehicle. We should canvass all the employees in the company."

Anderson said to Bishop, "You want to check that out while I'm at Hacker's Knoll?"

"Yessir, that's what I had in mind." Another look at his notes. Then he nodded his crisp hair toward Gillette. "Some crime scene techs did find a receipt for a light beer and martini in the trash bins behind the restaurant. They've lifted a couple of prints. They're sending 'em to the bureau for APIS."

Tony Mott noticed Gillette's frown of curiosity. "Automated Fingerprint Identification System," he explained to the hacker. "It'll search the federal system and then do a state-by-state search. Takes time to do the whole country but if he's been collared for anything in the past eight or nine years we'll probably get a match."

Although he had a real talent for computers Mott was fascinated with what he called "real police work" and was constantly hounding Anderson for a transfer to Homicide or Major Crimes so he could go chase "real perps." He was undoubtedly the only cybercop in the country who wore as his sidearm a car-stopping.45 automatic.

Bishop said, "They'll concentrate on the West Coast first. California, Washington, Oregon and-"

"No," Gillette said. "Go east to west. Do New Jersey, New York, Massachusetts and North Carolina first. Then Illinois and Wisconsin. Then Texas. Do California last."

"Why?" Bishop asked.

"Those Unix commands he typed? They were the East Coast version."

Patricia Nolan explained that there were several versions of the Unix operating system. Using the East Coast commands suggested that the killer had Atlantic seaboard roots. Bishop nodded and called this information into headquarters. He then glanced at his notebook and said, "There's one other thing we should add to the profile."

"What's that?" Anderson asked.

"The ID division said that it looks like the perp was in an accident of some kind. He's missing the tips of most of his fingers. He's got enough of the pads to leave prints but the tips end in scar tissue. The ID tech was thinking maybe he'd been injured in a fire."

Gillette shook his head. "Callus."

The cops looked at him. Gillette held up his own hands. The fingertips were flat and ended in yellow calluses. "It's called a 'hacker manicure,'" he explained. "You pound keys twelve hours a day, this's what happens."

Shelton wrote this on the white-board.

Gillette said, "What I want to do now is go online and check out some of the renegade hacking newsgroups and chat rooms. Whatever the killer's doing is the sort of thing that's going to cause a big stir in the underground and-"

"No, you're not going online," Anderson told him.

"What?"

"Nope," the cop repeated adamantly.

"I have to."

"No. Those're the rules. You stay offline."

"Wait a minute," Shelton said. "He was online. I saw him."

Anderson 's head swiveled toward the cop. "He was?"

"Yeah, in that room in the back – the lab. I looked in on him when he was checking out the victim's computer." He glanced at Anderson. "I assumed you okayed it."

"No, I didn't." Anderson asked Gillette, "Did you log on?"

"No," Gillette said firmly. "He must've seen me writing my kludge and thought I was online."

"Looked like it to me," Shelton said.

"You're wrong."

Shelton smiled sourly and appeared unconvinced.

Anderson could have checked out the log-in files of the CCU computer to find out for certain. But then decided that whether or not he'd gone online didn't really matter. Gillette's job here was finished. He picked up the phone and called HQ. "We've got a prisoner here to be transferred back to the San Jose Correctional Facility."

Gillette turned toward him, dismay in his eyes. "No," he said. "You can'tsend me back."

"I'll make sure you get that laptop we promised you."

"No, you don't understand. I can't stop now. We've got to find out what this guy did to get into her machine."

Shelton grumbled, "You said you couldn't find anything."

"That's exactly the problem. If I had found something we could understand it. But I can't. That's what's so scary about what he did. I need to keep going."

Anderson said, "If we find the killer's machine – or another victim's – and if we need you to analyze it we'll bring you back."

"But the chat rooms, the newsgroups, the hacker sites… there could be a hundred leads there. People have to be talking about software like this."

Anderson saw the addict's desperation in Gillette's face, just as the warden had predicted.

The cybercop pulled on his raincoat and said firmly, "We'll take it from here, Wyatt. And thanks again."

CHAPTER 00001000 / EIGHT

He wasn't going to make it, Jamie Turner realized with dismay.

The time was nearly noon and he was sitting by himself in the cold, dim computer room, still in his damp soccer outfit (playing in the mist doesn't build character at all, Booty; it just makes you fucking wet). But he didn't want to waste the time on a shower and change of clothes. When he'd been out on the playing field all he'd been able to think about was whether the college computer he'd hacked into had cracked the outer-gate passcode.

And now, peering at the monitor through his thick, misted glasses, he saw that the Cray probably wasn't going to spit out the decrypted password in time. It would take, he estimated, another two days to crack the code.

He thought about his brother, about the Santana concert, about the backstage passes – all just out of reach – and he felt like crying. He began to type some commands to see if he could log on to another of the school's computers -a faster one, in the physics department. But there was a long queue of users waiting to get into that one. Jamie sat back and, out of frustration, not hunger, wolfed down a package of M &Ms.

He felt a painful chill and he looked quickly around the dark, musty room. He shivered in fear.

That damn ghost again…

Maybe he should just forget the whole thing. He was sick of being scared, sick of being cold. He should get the hell out of here, go hang with Dave or Totter or some of the guys from French club. His hands went to the keyboard to stop Crack-er and run the cloaking program that would destroy the evidence of his hack.

Then something happened.

On the screen in front of him the root directory of the college's computer suddenly appeared. Way bizarre! Then, all by itself, the computer dialed out to another one, outside of the school. The machines electronically shook hands and a moment later Jamie Turner's Crack-er and Booty's password file were transferred to the second computer.

How the hell had that happened?

Jamie Turner was very savvy in the ways of computers but he'd never seen this. The only explanation was that the first computer – the college's – had some kind of arrangement with other computer departments so that tasks that took a long time were automatically transferred to speedier machines.

But what was totally weird was that the machine Jamie's software had been transferred to was the Defense Research Center 's massive parallel array of supercomputers in Colorado Springs, one of the fastest computer systems in the world. It was also one of the most secure and was virtually impossible to crack (Jamie knew; he'd tried it). It contained highly classified information and no civilian had ever been allowed to use it in the past. Jamie supposed they'd started renting out the system to defray the huge cost of maintaining a parallel array. Ecstatic, he peered at the screen and saw that the DRC's machines were cracking Booty's passcode at a blistering rate.

Well, if there was a ghost in his machine, he decided, maybe it was a good ghost after all. Maybe it was even a Santana fan, he laughed to himself.

Jamie now turned to his next task, the second hack he needed to complete before the Great Escape. In less than sixty seconds he'd transformed himself into a middle-aged overworked service tech employed by West Coast Security Systems, Inc., who'd unfortunately misplaced the schematic diagram for an WCS Model 8872 alarmed fire door he was trying to repair and needed some help from the technical supervisor. The man was all too happy to oblige.

Phate, sitting at his dining room office, was watching Jamie Turner's program hard at work in the Defense Research Center 's supercomputers, where he'd just sent it, along with the password file.

Unknown to the sysadmins at the DRC the huge computers were presently under his root control and were burning about $25,000 of computer time for the sole purpose of letting a sophomore in high school open a single locked gate.

Phate had examined the progress of the first supercomputer Jamie had used at a nearby college and had seen at once that it wasn't going to spit out the passcode in time for the boy to escape from the school for his 6:30 rendezvous with his brother.

Which meant that he'd stay safely tucked away at St. Francis and Phate would lose this round of the game. And that wasn't acceptable.

But, as he'd known, the DRC's parallel array would easily crack the code before the deadline.

If Jamie Turner had actually gotten to the concert that night – which wasn't going to happen now – he'd have had Phate to thank.

Phate then hacked into the San Jose City Planning and Zoning Board computer files and found a construction proposal, submitted by the principal of St. Francis Academy, who'd wanted to put up a gated wall and needed P &Z approval. Phate downloaded the documents and printed out diagrams of the school itself and the grounds.

As he was examining the diagrams his machine beeped and a box flashed onto the screen, alerting him that he'd received an e-mail from Shawn.

He felt the ping of excitement he always did when Shawn sent a message. This reaction struck him as significant, an important insight into Phate's – no, make that Jon Holloway's – personal development. He'd grown up in a household where love was as rare as money was plentiful and he knew that he'd developed into a cold, distant person.

He'd felt this way toward everyone – his family, fellow workers, classmates and the few people he'd tried to have relationships with. And yet the depth of what Phate felt for Shawn proved that he wasn't emotionally dead, that he had within him a vast well of love.

Eager to read the message he logged off the planning and zoning network and called up the e-mail.

But as he read the stark words the smile slipped from his face, his breath grew rapid, his pulse increased. "Oh, Christ," he muttered.

The gist of the e-mail was that the police were much further along on his trail than he'd anticipated. They even knew about the killings in Portland and Virginia.

Then he glanced at the second paragraph and got no further than the reference to Milliken Park.

No, no…

He now had a real problem.

Phate rose from his desk and hurried downstairs to the basement of his house. He glanced at another smear of dried blood on the floor – from the Lara Gibson character – and then opened a footlocker. From it he took his dark, stained knife. He walked to the closet, opened it and flicked the light on.

Ten minutes later he was in his Jaguar, speeding onto the freeway.

In the beginning God created the Advanced Research Projects Agency network, which was called ARPAnet, and the ARPAnet flourished and begat the Milnet, and the ARPAnet and the Milnet begat the Internet, and the Internet and its issue, Usenet newsgroups and the World Wide Web, became a trinity that changed the life of His people forever and ever.

Andy Anderson – who'd described the Net thus when he taught classes on computer history – thought of this slightly too-witty description now as he drove through Palo Alto and saw Stanford University ahead of him. For it was at the nearby Stanford Research Institute that the Department of Defense had established the Internet's predecessor in 1969 to link the SRI with UCLA, the University of

California at Santa Barbara and the University of Utah.

The reverence he felt for the site, however, faded quickly as he drove on through misty rain and saw the deserted hill of Hacker's Knoll ahead of him, in John Milliken Park. Normally the place would be crowded with young people swapping software and tales of their cyber exploits. Today, though, the cold April drizzle had emptied the place.

He parked, pulled on the rumpled gray rain hat his six-year-old daughter had given him as a birthday present and climbed out of the car, striding through the grass, as streamers of rain flew from his shoes. He was discouraged by the lack of possible witnesses who might have a lead to Peter Fowler, the gunrunner. Still, there was a covered bridge in the middle of the park; sometimes kids hung out there when it was rainy or cold.

But as Anderson approached he saw that the bridge too was deserted.

He paused and looked around. The only people here clearly weren't hackers: an elderly woman walking a dog, and a businessman making a cell phone call under the awning of one of the nearby university buildings.

Anderson recalled a coffee shop in downtown Palo Alto, near the Hotel California. It was a place where geeks gathered to sip strong coffee and swap tales of their outrageous hacks. He decided to try the restaurant and see if anyone had heard about Peter Fowler or somebody selling knives in the area. If not, he'd try the computer science building and ask some of the professors and grad students if they'd seen anybody who -

Then the detective saw motion nearby.

Fifty feet away was a young man, walking furtively through the bushes toward the bridge. He was looking around uneasily, clearly paranoid.

Anderson ducked behind a thick stand of juniper, his heart pounding like a pile driver – because this was, he knew, Lara Gibson's killer. He was in his twenties and was wearing the blue jean jacket that must've shed the denim fibers found on the woman's body. He had blond hair and was clean shaven; the beard and mustache he'd worn in the bar had been fake, glued on with the theatrical adhesive.

Social engineering…

Then the man's jacket fell away for a moment and Anderson could see, protruding from the waistband of the man's jeans, the knobby hilt of a Ka-bar knife. The killer quickly pulled the jacket closed and continued to the covered bridge, where he stepped into the shadows and peered out.

Anderson remained out of sight. He made a call to the state police's field operations central dispatch. A moment later he heard the dispatcher answer and ask for his badge number.

"Four three eight nine two," Anderson whispered in reply. "Request immediate backup. I've got a visual on a suspect in a homicide. I'm in John Milliken Park, Palo Alto, southeast corner."

"Copy, four three eight," the man replied. "Is suspect armed?"

"I see a knife. I don't know about any firearms."

"Is he in a vehicle?"

"Negative," Anderson said. "He's on foot at the moment."

The dispatcher asked him to hold on. Anderson stared at the killer, squinting hard, as if that would keep him frozen in place. He whispered to central, "What's the ETA of that backup?"

"One moment, four three eight… Okay, be advised, they'll be there in twelve minutes."

"Can't you get somebody here faster than that?"

"Negative, four three eight. Can you stay with him?"

"I'll try."

But just then the man began walking again. He left the bridge and started down the sidewalk.

"He's on the move, central. He's heading west through the middle of the park toward some university buildings, I'll stay with him and keep you posted on his location."

"Copy that, four three eight. CAU is on its way."

CAU? he wondered. What the hell was that again? Oh, right: closest available unit.

Hugging the trees and brush, Anderson moved closer to the bridge, keeping out of the killer's sight. What had he come back here for? To find another victim? To cover up some traces of the earlier crime? To buy more weapons from Peter Fowler?

He glanced at his watch. Less than a minute had passed. Should he call back and tell the unit to roll up silently? He didn't know. There were probably procedures for handling this sort of situation – procedures that cops like Frank Bishop and Bob Shelton would surely know well. Anderson was used to a very different kind of police work. Hisstakeouts were conducted sitting in vans, staring at the screen of a Toshiba laptop connected to a Cellscope radio directional-finding system.

Then he remembered: his weapon…

He looked down at the chunky butt of the Clock. He pulled it off his hip and pointed it downward, finger outside the trigger, as he vaguely remembered he ought to do.

Then, through the mist, he heard a faint electronic trill.

The killer had gotten a phone call. He pulled a cell phone off his belt and held it to his ear. He glanced at his watch, spoke a few words. Then he put the phone away and turned back the way he'd come.

Hell, he's going back to his car, the detective thought. I'm going lose him…

Ten minutes till the backup gets here. Jesus…

Andy Anderson decided he had no choice. He was going to do something he'd never done: make an arrest alone.

CHAPTER 00001001 / NINE

Anderson moved next to a low bush. The killer was walking quickly along the path, hands in his pockets.

That was good, Anderson decided – the hands encumbered, which would make it more difficult to get to the knife.

But wait, he wondered: What if he was hiding a pistol in his pocket?

Okay, keep that in mind.

And remember too that he might have Mace or pepper spray or tear gas.

And remember that he might simply turn and sprint away. The cop wondered what he'd do then. What were the fleeing felon rules? Could he shoot the killer in the back?

He'd busted dozens of criminals but he'd always been backed up by cops like Frank Bishop, for whom guns and high-risk arrests were as routine as compiling a program in C++ was for Anderson.

The detective now moved closer to the killer, thankful the rain was obscuring the sound of his footsteps. They were paralleling each other now on opposite sides of a row of tall boxwood. Anderson kept low and squinted through the rain. He got a good look at the killer's face. An intense curiosity coursed through him: What made this young man commit the terrible crimes he was responsible for? This curiosity was similar to what he felt when examining software code or puzzling over the crimes CCU investigated – but it was stronger now because, though he understood the principles of computer science and the crimes that that science made possible, a criminal like this was a pure enigma to Andy Anderson.

Except for the knife, except for the gun he might or might not be clutching in his hidden hand, the man seemed benign, almost friendly.

The detective wiped his hand on his shirt to dry some of the rain and gripped the pistol firmly once more. He continued on. This's a hell of a lot different from taking down hackers at a public terminal in the mall or serving warrants in houses where the biggest dangers were the plates of putrid food sitting stacked next to a teenager's machine.

Closer, closer…

Twenty feet farther on, their paths would converge. Soon Anderson would have no more cover and he'd have to make his move.

For an instant his courage broke and he stopped. He thought of his wife and daughter. And how alien he felt here, how completely out of his depth he was. He thought: Just follow the killer back to his car, get the license plate and follow as best you can.

But then Anderson thought of the deaths this man had caused and the deaths that he'd cause again if not stopped. This might be their only chance to capture him.

He started forward again along the path that would intersect with the killer's.

Ten feet.

Eight…

A deep breath.

Watch the hand in the pocket, he reminded himself.

A bird flew close – a gull – and the killer turned to look at it, startled. He laughed.

And that was when Anderson burst from the bushes, shoving the pistol toward the killer, shouting, "Freeze! Police! Hand out of your pocket!"

The man spun around to face the detective, muttering, "Shit." He hesitated for a moment.

Anderson brought the gun even with the killer's chest. "Now! Move slow!"

The hands appeared. Anderson stared at the fingers. What was he holding?

He almost laughed. It was a rabbit's foot. A lucky key chain.

"Drop it."

He did and then lifted his hands in the resigned, familiar way of someone who's been through an arrest before.

"Lie down on the ground and keep your arms spread."

"Jesus," the man spat out. "Jesus. How the fuck did you find me?"

"Do it," Anderson shouted in a quaking voice.

The killer lay down on the ground, half on the grass and half on the sidewalk. Anderson was kneeling over him, shoving his gun into the man's neck as he put the cuffs on, an awkward feat that took several tries. He then frisked the killer and relieved him of the Ka-bar knife and cell phone and wallet. He had been carrying a small pistol, it turned out, but that had been in the pocket of his jacket. The weapons, wallet, phone and rabbit's foot went into a pile on the grass nearby. Anderson stepped back, his hands shaking from the adrenaline.

"Where the fuck d'you come from?" the man muttered.

Anderson didn't respond but just stared at his prisoner as the shock of what he'd done was replaced with euphoria. What a story he'd have to tell! His wife would love it. He wanted to tell his little daughter but that would have to wait a few years. Oh, and Stan, his neighbors, who -

Then Anderson realized that he'd forgotten the Miranda warning. He didn't want to blow an arrest like this by making a technical mistake. He found the card in his wallet and read the words stiffly.

The killer muttered that he understood his rights.

"Officer, you okay?" a man's voice called. "You need any help?"

Anderson glanced behind him. It was the businessman he'd seen under the awning. His dark suit, expensive-looking, was dampened by the rain. "I've got a cell phone. You need to use it?"

"No, no, that's okay, everything's under control." Anderson turned back to his prisoner. He holstered his weapon and pulled out his own cell phone to report in. He hit redial but for some reason the call wouldn't go through. He glanced at the screen and the phone reported, NO SIGNAL.

That was odd. Why -

And in an instant – an instant of pure horror – he realized that no street cop in the world would've let an unidentified civilian get behind him during an arrest. As he groped for his pistol and started to turn, the businessman grabbed his shoulder and the detective felt an explosion of pain in his back.

Anderson cried out and dropped to his knees. The man stabbed him again with his own Kabar knife.

"No, please, no…"

The man lifted away Anderson 's gun and kicked him forward onto the wet sidewalk.

He then walked over to the young man Anderson had just handcuffed. He rolled him over on his side and looked down.

"Man, I'm fucking glad you're here," the cuffed man said. "This guy comes out of nowhere and I thought I was fucked. Get me out of these things, will you? I -

"Shhhh," the businessman said and turned back to the CCU cop, who was struggling to reach the terrible pain in his back, trying to touch it. If he could only touch it then the searing agony would go away.

The attacker crouched down next to him.

"You're the one," Anderson whispered to the businessman. "You killed Lara Gibson." His eyes flicked to the man he'd handcuffed. "And he's Fowler."

The man nodded. "That's right." Then he said, "And you're Andy Anderson." The awe in his voice was genuine. "I didn't think it'd be you coming after me. I mean, I knew you worked for the Computer Crimes Unit and'd be investigating the Gibson case. But not here, not in the field. Amazing… Andy Anderson. You're a total wizard."

"Please… I've got a family! Please."

Then the killer did something odd.

Holding the knife in one hand, he touched the cop's abdomen with the other. Then he slid his fingers up slowly to the detective's chest, counting ribs, beneath which his heart was beating so very quickly.

"Please," Anderson pleaded.

The killer paused and lowered his head to Anderson 's ear. "You never know somebody the way you know them at a moment like this," he whispered, then resumed his eerie reconnaissance of the cop's chest.